Lolita Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Some Facts, The Story And On The Obscure

Table of Contents

Summary

For Nabokov, composing Lolita had been just like “the composition of a beautiful puzzle”. For me, to have seen the movie, and later, to have read the book, was as though something different from anything else I had ever read or witnessed before emerged all of a sudden and an imperious need to shed some light on the multiple facets of the book surfaced. There was no way for me to solve the puzzle without first trying to gather the pieces which had been scattered by so many critics and reviewers for more than half a century now. It is why I decided to explore the facts around Lolita’s publishing “issue” while also closely observing the characters from two different perspectives: analyzing the so called love story first and separating Humbert and Lolita from each other afterwards. Somewhere along the research conducted for this paper I came across an interesting aspect which, as it turned out, has provoked me more than any other feature regarding Lolita. The contents of my explorations are included within Chapter III and have to do with the sense of morality and the concept of obscurity in Nabokov’s writings, respectively Lolita. At the very foundation of my paper stood different theses I accessed while browsing websites of certain universities and numerous articles in online journals have proved quite useful in placing Lolita within the right context.

Generally, I would not consider the date when a book has been published to be utterly important when presenting it, just as I wouldn’t deem as highly imperative exposing the facts around the circumstances of the book being published. But Lolita is not just any book. It is quite a special book, one that has created much controversy, one that has been denied initially and later prohibited. These are at the same time effects and factors which I’ve chosen to reveal within Chapter One because I think they are relevant in respect to the aura created around Lolita and they would explain, in my opinion, the success it eventually achieved. I wanted to bring the characters closer to the audience and to analyze them first by relating them to one another, hence my decision to explore Lolita by looking at the relationship between Humbert and Lolita herself. Some have established this relationship as perverse, others have labelled it as love; I, on the other hand, simply decided to explore it as it had been presented and draw my own conclusions afterwards, in the second chapter. Really getting to know Humbert is just as difficult as trying to know who Lolita, or Dolores Haze, if you wish, might be. While we can put our unfamiliarity with Lolita at the expense of Humbert solipsizing her, we are bound to regard the former as unreliable in what he says because so much of his confession seems to have been blurred by an outer reality, a world created by Humbert alone in which he pulls the strings. We are however absorbed by his passionate address in such a way that we feel unable to blame him at times for his actions on Lolita. It is difficult to know if Humbert truly loves her or if he merely wants to make himself believe so as a response to his own guilty conscience. If he proves that he loves her then all is fair in love and war, one might say. What difference would his age make compared to hers or his abuse towards Lolita? Then again, in his own constructed world, Humbert is not obliged to obey any moral or whatsoever rules, so whatever happens with Lolita is perfectly “normal”. She refuses however to be lost for ever in Humbert’s fantastic realm and she escapes his abuses with Quilty’s help, another facet of Humbert’s guilty conscience, some critics say.

An interesting perspective on Humbert’s personality is to try and look for Nabokov himself amidst all his denials of such a similarity ever existing. The matter of style, the allusions to certain art or literature works, their similar professions, all these tie them together as though the former is the reflection of the latter, though not entirely, but merely as an element, part of a bigger picture. To incite his readers further, Vladimir Nabokov proved to be a fan of metaphysics and otherworld creator in most of his writings. Lolita is not an exception. References to myths and magic are portrayed throughout Humbert’s narration. Certain terms indicating the world of fairy tales are repeatedly used and the whole concept of the book spins around the idea. To Humbert, nymphets are “demoniac creatures” who, by their power, enslave certain “bewitched travelers” and Nabokov himself admits to his nymphet being mythical. Overall, obscurity embeds all of the other aspects in Lolita. Nabokov’s style of writing or his “aesthetic bliss” is the point where everything merges to form one perfectly shaped image of an outer world. This otherworld becomes visible to readers after several readings and only presuming the necessary attention has been given to the matter.

My task of putting together pieces of the puzzle Lolita has proven harder than initially thought. One reason for this is related to the lack of Romanian criticism in regards to Nabokov’s works and, ironically enough, the overflow of Western information. By initiating this paper, I’ve looked at how the amount of information existing within the three W’s can confuse the less experienced reader who is faced with harsh critiques on Vladimir Nabokov’s writings, especially when it comes to Lolita. I believe it is important to include the novel in the list of compulsory studies, either in universities or even in high school because it is my opinion such a book has much to offer, it causes polemics because of its outrageous content and its moral subject and might very well incite the mind of students to analytical studies which we need in any domain.

Introduction

It was on a late evening in September that the author of this paper was introduced for the first time to Lolita, on one of those days that still bear the sultriness of late summer but are impregnated with a lovely scent of gentle autumn, when the sun mixes beautiful rays of reddish colors and the gentle breeze caresses the shape of centennial trees: a rainy day, a perfect day to watch a movie. I had found a DVD on sales some time before that in one of those rusty music and movies boutiques which are found on the corner of some peculiar street in small medieval towns where I am fond of going sometimes to explore the mythical part of Romanian territory. It had been lying around jumbled up within piles of other DVDs and CDs along with unfamiliar discs of vinyl for, what it seemed then, dozens of years. It was a 1999 special edition of Adrian Lyne’s version of Lolita. Now, it should be noted that I had no way of knowing what the movie was about for what drew my attention in the first place had been the picture of Jeremy Irons and the fact that he was the protagonist in the story. I did not know anything at the time of the book Lolita neither about the existence of Vladimir Nabokov. It is with a feeling of guilt that I recognize this here because, once you enter the world of the author, it leaves you wishing you had met him earlier and the fact that you didn’t induces a trail of remorse as though you have missed something far greater than anything else you have witnessed before.

The movie was a success if success is the right word to use. I consider it successful for it made me want to dig up more about the story and that eventually led me to Nabokov and his writings. When it comes to movies based on some author’s pieces of literature it is always recommended to read the book first prior to watching the movie and I firmly believe so as well. Any novel that has been filtered by a director’s technique and a screenwriter’s point of view can rarely encompass the original writer’s vision of things. Upon finding out about the existence of the book, I regretted seeing the movie first instead of reading Lolita. Then again, had I not seen the movie I might have not met Nabokov at all. So, all things considered, the book following the movie incited me to pay intrinsic attention to the story behind the story and I took the decision of exploring Lolita further within this paper. It was relevant to write it in English because I had access to an English version before obtaining a translation and once that occurred I was too much involved with getting through all the reading in its own original style. By that time I felt that any Romanian translation, be it as close to its native version as possible, could have simply not stir up the same kind of emotion I already dealt with from running the gamut of Nabokov’s vivid novel.

If watching the film had left me deeply disturbed, hence my reason for purchasing a readable copy, then actually reading Lolita proved a difficult task even more so because I had to ignore any vision of the characters and upon the subject that I had formed from previously watching Lyne’s adaptation. I scattered of as many misconceptions as humanly possible that might have found residence within my analytical mind and set off on a journey to unravel the many worlds of Lolita and, just as Nabokov’s travels in search of butterflies, I hoped to shed some light on particular aspects of Lolita’s “lepidopteron” diversity. My intention has been to explore the multiple facets of the writing in order to observe to what extend could they be interrelated and if there is any possibility of knowing one without necessarily having to know the other. That is, could one read Lolita and obtain the absolute confidence of knowing what all is about at once? Can anyone depict if certain references within the text are not what they seem but subtle allusions to other fantastic worlds of creation and inquisitive advising from the author’s behalf? These questions have formed the objective of me conducting the documentation for this paper and finally drawing my answers based on it and my personal observations.

Within the Romanian compulsory field of educative studies there are very few works the like of Lolita which are included. Lolita itself is not. What I am attempting by focusing on it is to draw the attention on how a novel such as this could enrich the visions of students and professors alike when dealing with a story that can be analyzed not only within the lexicon of the literary field but also from a psychological point of view. To me, Lolita is not just a novel but has become a piece of art, a painting, a song, a sculpture, and whatever else shape of art one could think of. I consider as fairly important for as many of us to be introduced into the inner world of such classics because the tentacles of inspiration are widely spread so that their power is deemed to overcome any preconceptions. What we can learn from it probably surpasses anything that Nabokov intended for his readers when he wrote the book.

In comparing the works of Vladimir Nabokov generally and Lolita specifically with the amount of interest given to them by the Romanian reviewers, I have found a rather disappointing percentage. Translations are available for part of Nabokov’s writings, very few compared to his actual work I think but, when it comes to themes of debating these writings, the auditorium, as in the case of a bad play, is more empty than full and Lolita is anything but a bad performance. The Public Library reveals a certain amount of books dedicated to the works of Nabokov, but only a few of them are actually accessible. While I have used some as a source of inspiration for this paper, I mainly directed the explorations towards Western critics and papers on the subject of Nabokov and his Lolita. I’ve used a number of theses that I’ve found while browsing the websites of certain foreign universities and decided to embed them within the bibliography for they proved to be quite authentic and helpful. Among them there is Rosemary Janine Means’s Images and Perspectives of the Women in Lolit the Women in Lolita and Heather Menzies Jones’s Nabokov’s Dark American Dream. A number of articles posted on the web pages of online journals have also helped in clarifying some features and in fixing them within the right context. All together, Western literary historiography seems to have paid a distinct attention in analyzing and explaining Vladimir Nabokov’s artistic heritage with Brian Boyd being considered his main biographer along with the inquiries of Alfred Appel Jr. which are often quoted. The latter is known to have shown a particular interest in Lolita with “The Springboard of Parody”, “Backgrounds of Lolita”, “The Annotated Lolita” or “Tristram in Movielove: ‘Lolita’ at the movies”. An extensive but not comprehensive bibliography can be found within Zembla which is a site dedicated to the life and works of Vladimir Nabokov.

When I first took the initiative of conducting the study I thought of exploring a particular aspect within Lolita, maybe to focus on the author’s allusions in the text on the theme of symbolism (which Nabokov so bitterly deplored) or to reduce the reading to a detailed view of the characters. However, one thing led to the other and I felt a necessity to focus on the generative image of the novel. So what I’ve done is that I directed the search towards certain “technical” aspects included within “The Abyssal Lolita” chapter following some information upon the publishing issue (“Facts and ‘Strong Opinions’ on Lolita”) and the immediate reactions it received (“Incomprehensible Lolita”). I then offered a reading of the novel based solely on the existing relationship between the main characters (“Not your typical love story”) which helped me in understanding their personality further expanded in the second chapter “The reflected world”. And upon drawing similarities between Humbert Humbert and Nabokov I proceeded with a chapter dedicated to the otherworld of Lolita which becomes available to readers only after attempting several readings. Thus my journey in discovering Lolita had started simply by watching a movie and developed into a topic of wider knowledge and comprehension. Nevertheless, I would not go as far as saying I have seen the bigger picture and have understood or included everything about it.

Chapter I. The abyssal Lolita

I.1. Facts and “strong opinions” on Lolita

“Certain books achieve a sort of underground reputation before they are published. Gossip arouses expectations that they are even nastier than the last succès de scandale. College students returning from visits to Paris demonstrate their newly acquired sophistication by brandishing paperbound copies. College professors write solemn critical analyses in scholarly publications. And if their authors are really lucky some act of official censorship publicizes their work to the masses. “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov is such a book.”

Orville Prescott – August, 1958

The year was 1955 when a certain Lolita was just about to storm the world. The virus did not spread widely until 1958 when it began intoxicating people with fascination and resentment alike. It was bred within the magnificent surroundings of Rocky Mountains in North America and several other places, where Vladimir Nabokov often went tripping in the early 1950’s. But the “first little throb” that inspired him to write Lolita had been felt

in Paris in ‘39 or perhaps early in ‘40…somehow prompted… by a newspaper story… about an ape in the Paris Zoo, who after months of coaxing by scientists produced finally the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal, and this sketch, reproduced in the paper, showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.

There were certain inquires regarding this statement undertaken by Michael Juliar who has dedicated much of his studies to the works of the author above. In the fall of 1998 the bibliographer of Vladimir Nabokov posted a note on the online dedicated Forum trying “to touch on an old thread regarding Nabokov’s claim for the inspiration of Lolita”. Within the note Juliar pointed out some articles which had appeared during the course of 1949, 1942 and 1938 years, the three of them concerning sets of photographs taken by apes. Apparently, all the photographs were emphasized on the bars of the cages where the animals were being kept, while the people had been pictured in the background (see Annex 1 and Annex 2). The question he raised was whether Nabokov had been inspired by the shutterbug ape from 1938 (considering he would have had access to a European print of the subject) to write Volshebnik, a “thematic prelude for Lolita” or if he had referred to the case in 1942 linking it directly to Lolita. Clearly though that “first shiver of inspiration” could not have come in 1949, as Lolita was already emerging by then.

At the end of the first half of the twentieth century America proved itself unready to embrace a book that would eventually shake people’s moral beliefs to the ground. And so the story had to make its way towards a society that would open the path for it to live. It was in France that Lolita first saw the light of day when it was published by Olympia Press and, by no means, the event would pass silently. From the first breaths of being, the book aroused much controversy around the subject “as well as staunch and significant support for its artistic merit”. But despite that artistic merit, the French denied Lolita the right to become acquainted with the rest of the world, exportation of the book being forbidden by the Government. During the time, the book was sold to English tourists and, though the British customs tried to seize the copies from entering the country, it still managed to reach Graham Green who, upon reading it, published an article in a London newspaper. Somewhere in the neighborhood, John Gordon, a Scottish journalist, had his opinion all made up, naming Lolita “the filthiest book” he had ever read. And all of this because of the sexual relationship between a middle aged man and a twelve years old “nymphet”. As for the plot of the book, it was structured under the form of a European routed scholar’s confession, his name Humbert Humbert, who becomes infatuated with his stepdaughter, Lolita.

Nabokov first tried to publish his book in America but after being rejected several times due to its “too daring” character, he turned to France. However, news that a somehow “abnormal” story had made its way into French public bookstores prevailed some time before the paper actually reaching the U.S. In 1957 one could have purchased the book “from under the counters of some New York book dealers for about fifteen dollars” or buy it for half that price in Europe. The official release of Lolita in America was in 1958 after it had been established as “legal literature” and it included a comment by the author who had not done so for the edition published earlier. This “Afterword” would be included in further translations and editions like the English one in 1959 and several others in Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, India, etc. Needless to say, Lolita was taking over the world at a fast pace. Of all the translations, Nabokov declared he could guarantee “only for the French one”, not knowing “what the Egyptians and the Chinese did with the poor thing and […] what that “displaced lady” who had recently learned English would have done with it”. The author himself declared he was disappointed at his own Russian translation, having lost the touch with his native language “but also with the spirit of the language” who would turn out so rigid “in terms of style and rhythm”.

Lolita didn’t go by this name since the very beginning. Vladimir Nabokov had shared with a friend in 1947 that he was working on two stories: that of a man “who liked little girls” and would go by the name of The Kingdom by the Sea and a “scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality” – his autobiography as The Person in Question (later Speak, Memory). Bryan Boyd explains that Nabokov had intended to name the novel as above “because Humbert sees Lolita, the first time he meets her, as a reincarnation of the girl he loved at thirteen”. Indeed, Humbert himself admits “there might have been no Lolita at all” had he “not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl – child”. As for the name itself, the author revealed no particular meaning, but only that it “needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it” that would produce “the necessary note of archness and caress” for his Lolita.

Nabokov claimed that the novel hadn’t changed his life on a big scale prior to it being published, regardless of either the positive or negative reactions from the critics and the public alike. He admitted it allowed him to give up teaching in order to focus more on writing his works. Neither did he assume any of the speculations on his book being a “masterful satiric social commentary on America”. In fact, as I will show in the following chapters, he resented whenever someone would accuse him of such a thing as much as he disliked the fact that Lolita was often identified as merely a sexual affair. To him, writing the book “was just like composing riddles with elegant solutions” without any intention of portraying some kind of moral standards. However, the subject has been debated many times and has actually formed the bases for critical studies ever since.

Vladimir Nabokov never denied that Lolita had been the hardest of his books to write because, at the time, he had no real knowledge of America and certainly not about twelve year old girls. His work was to transpose the reality of a theme within a background he barely had any idea of, but he never once regretted imagining it. To him, Lolita had been “like the composition of a beautiful puzzle”, while others have rendered it as “a true and real reproduction of an illusory reality". If some of us might have felt, upon the reading, like we need to “recover” from it, most of the readers must have definitely wanted at one moment at least to spread the news of Lolita because, you see, it’s what it does, it spreads like a virus.

I.2. Not your typical love story

“…and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. “

Humbert Humbert

There are legends which constitute the very core of a land, there are acts of bravery that people always remember and there are stories which dwell in one’s mind for a very long time, long after they have been told. Such a story is that “of a white widowed male” who confides in his readers about the “uncommon” affair between him and a Lolita girl. A warning is in order here for all those who intend or have ever intended to meet Lolita: humor, and passion and much grief are planned along the way, so every reader would better buckle up for the trip that can twist and turn minds and hearts… If it happens that one comes face to face with Lolita, having had no previous acknowledgements of what it is all about, it is most likely for senses to turn bewildered. That is not to say that, if one has met Lolita before, their being could be any less affected by the reading.

This is my view of the story of Humbert Humbert, a 37 year old man with “a taste” for girls within “the age limits of nine and fourteen”, otherwise “pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes”. This is also my view on the story of Lolita, an American girl of twelve (to fourteen years of age along the script of the novel) whose true nature, in Humbert’s eyes, was “not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)”. It is also my own version of the book itself that has created a whole universe around the two characters and their imagined relationship. But it is not the concept of the book that I am concerned with exploring here but the tale which the narrator laid on paper at the time of his imprisonment, when Lolita was but a memory of his turmoil. As to why Humbert had spent some rest of his life in prison, we shall come to find that later.

So let us open the book to H. H’s extolling remembrance of a “four feet ten” girl whom he recons as “light of my life, fire of my loins”, his very sin and soul. Make no mistake, this is not your typical love story where a man loves a woman and they live happily ever after. This would have probably never been a love story at all if it had been told by Lolita. But, though the plot revolves around her, it’s only Humbert’s thoughts and perception that we have access to. And his voice, when speaking about Lolita, reveals deep emotions hidden from the years of his childhood and resembling a story of love he lived when he was thirteen. How he came to meet Lolita resides in a rather unpleasant situation. Humbert took the road to America after receiving an inheritance from his uncle who had been handling a perfume business. He spent some time producing perfume ads and was later invited by a university in New York to complete his work on French literature. He had also been a participant of an expedition into arctic Canada but the “robust outdoor life” he had so hoped to bring him “some relief’ didn’t manage to reach Humbert’s expectations. He tells us how, not long after returning “to civilization”, he suffered “another bout with insanity”.

Deciding to spend the summer somewhere in the countryside of New England, Humbert is deeply disappointed to find himself sent off to a Mrs. Haze's house when the one he was supposed to live in had burned down just the night before his arrival. This is how H.H comes to meet his Lolita, in a household from where his first impulse had been to run away from there as fast as possible. But the (re) encounter with the “princedom by the sea” from his early years as a teenager kept him captivated by the mirage of his “tortured past”. From then on we are witnesses of an endless procession of days turned into moments, turned into cravings, turned into the slippery world of one man’s fantasies and another girl’s tantalizing. Careful observations of Lolita while she completed her chores, lusting after her as she bayed in the summer sun soon turned into Humbert’s regular occupations as he became more and more “sick with longing”. The terror of desire had transformed into something almost unbearable for him to cope with, as he settled little “traps” to lure his prey. And, one particular Saturday, the mouse had finally bit the bait. While sitting at his desk, writing with the door intentionally left open, Humbert saw Lolita as she walked into the room and, to his delight, nestled on his knees. It was the first time the two of them had been granted a moment of such closeness without a third party involved and he could not help but feel his blood warmer with every inch of Lolita moving closer. Then, a week later, Humbert found he was alone with his darling once more and reenacted a scene of erotic endeavors with Lolita having no clue of his “monster like ecstasy”.

We ought to keep in mind that, despite the sexual cravings that may seclude Humbert’s intentions to a pornographic reality, he did declare himself “in love with Lolita forever” and though his eternal love is viable not for the woman Lolita would eventually turn into, but only for the “nymphet” he fell for in the first place, it does not diminish the intensity of his feelings. If anything, it would demonstrate all the more that his intentions go beyond the carnal desires up to the limits of a decent love obsession. But yes, this obsession did seem to turn into something rather unusual when Humbert started fantasizing about having the chance to “hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss…” if he married the mother. To this point, he would’ve had no other alternative but to do so, if ever should he have wanted to be close to Lolita. The mother had fallen in love with him and could see no other way of dealing with her feelings but either marrying him or ask him to leave. As it happened, the two of them tied the knot while Lolita was at camp.

One might say (including I) that the true story of Humbert and Lolita together started right after Mrs. Haze, mother of the girl, died in a silly car crash. Her death isn’t something for Humbert to portray as tragic especially since he alone had played with the idea before; in fact, one doesn’t even have to look really carefully to catch the glimpse of H.H.’s quizzing mind about what was to lie ahead. His main concern then was only in regards to people finding out about the promiscuity of his relationship with Lolita. But Humbert needn’t have worried about that, people would only find out about his Lo “affections” long after both of them have left the earth to a more heavenly place.

The newly stepfather left Ramsdale to meet his daughter at camp and, from there on, he carefully planned trips across the States with the idea of a father-daughter normal situation that people would regard as such. The first night to ever share a bed with Lolita had been attentively planned for by Humbert and The Enchanted Hunters hotel seemed to be the appropriate place for such a plan. But the pill Humbert had slipped to Lolita (hoping it would induce a deep sleep) did not work and he was unable to conclude with his intentions because, as he himself would write, “a brutal scoundrel” wasn’t what he was.

Again, we witness here the story as in a man’s testimonial, a man who is blinded by his desires, but not tragically bound to feed them at any cost. Despite the urges to possess Lolita, he manages to control himself long enough for, when the moment would happen she would have no recollections of it. True, it is difficult to draw a line here between the right and wrong. But trying to establish such values within the story can only be confusing much to the reader as for the critics. This is not an easy story to analyze so maybe it is best to just keep reading for now.

So Humbert had intended to finalize his intentions the night before, while Lolita was asleep but his plan hadn’t gone as expected. Little did he know then that, before the sun would reach its highest point the next morning, Lolita would be his, wide awake and in all the consciousness of her beguilement. And all the tremors of the moment would transpose themselves into the beautiful scenery of a lake, into “nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise”, into the acts of “a sultan…helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx”, into the initiating “fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child”, heaven and hell at once, thus his perception of the act would be. Lolita had told Humbert by now of the sexual experiences at camp with a Charlie boy, merely immersed by her curiosity of child-ness. By confessing she had not been a total stranger to the intercourse, Lolita offered Humbert a slight feeling of relievement. And his thoughts battered between feelings of sympathy for the orphan child and rushes of despair and desire for the nymphet. The latter would eventually take hold of him more than his guilt of taking advantage of this “daisy-fresh girl”.

Lolita and Humbert would travel the States like real troubadours, vividly living their affair in motels and spending no more than a few nights in one place. He would feed the appetite of an “exasperating brat” with “sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines” all the while disliking her “disgustingly conventional” habits. Despite this, though, he could not see himself apart from his Lo and every time she would threaten him (either real intentions or just childish pranks) with going to the police for rape, he made it his business to convince Lolita of the consequences of such actions. So they stayed together, for a bit more time, at least, driving past American roadside restaurants and into the picturesque landscapes along the way. Days would consume themselves between intimate moments and visits at the museum, tennis lessons, bathing under the warm rays of the sun on some beach and all sorts of activities that Humbert would plan to keep his (so easily bored) stepdaughter excited. Now and then, thoughts of the future would pass his mind and a feeling of unease would take hold of Humbert’s being while foreseeing how Lolita would cease to be his nymphet in just a few years and his imagination would go as far as to the idea of conceiving a “Lolita the Second” who might quench his fire. But he would have immediately put out the flames of his burning thoughts to concentrate on the moments of delight which Lolita so willingly was prepared to offer him.

At one moment it occurred to Humbert that settling somewhere would give his Lolita a sense of stability as well as normality. After all, she did have to attend some school and be educated like any other girls her age. That was not the single reason though why he would have her join the Beardsley College for Women back in the east. His null knowledge of guardianship and his uncertainty of whether or not some legal actions might run their course in respects to Lolita’s care urged him to find a place where he could easily inquire about the matters. So, after a year traveling ‘round the States, Lolita was to enter a private school where the main subjects were “the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating, and Dating”, all the long Humbert spending his time in between his studies and chess games with his friend Gaston Godin.

Henceforth, we can observe the relationship between the two becoming somewhat of a two ways manipulation, where Lolita would push her stepfather into raising her allowance and he would request in exchange many more “loveable” favors. Suspicion grew in Humbert’s mind that Lolita might save the money to run away. He had not been worried that Lola could fall for a young boy because he was convinced that his “sophisticated young mistress” found boys of her age to be quite boring. Humbert would agree to the idea of Lolita going to mixed parties or hanging out with her girlfriends, but he would restrain her from dating or participating in boys-girls gatherings. This is something that little Lo viewed as a violation of her rights and not merely as a concerning way of a father trying to protect his daughter. She would have been right in the matter, for the reason why Humbert acted this way was to, indeed, prevent his mistress from becoming fond of a male. However, his intentions were not all aimed at depriving the girl from having a normal social life. This one time, he threw a party with both girls and boys alike, a party that, to his delight, had turned out to be quite dull for Lo’s tastes, specifically the boys being “the most revolting bunch”.

A play at school had caught the interest of Lolita and Humbert had given his approval for the girl to be part of it. The Enchanted Hunters was the written story of a farmer’s daughter with a bright imagination who believes of herself to be a witch with hypnotizing powers which she gains from reading a book. Dwelling on these powers, she induces trances to lost hunters only to eventually fall herself under the mirage of a poet. Lolita would play the farmer’s daughter while the role of the poet would be played by Mona, her friend.

Humbert and Lo had their fights regularly, mostly due to the girl’s ambitions and the stepfather’s control over her, but this play would initiate the “strident and hateful scene” ever to occur between them. As he would eventually find out from her piano teacher, Lolita had skipped the last two classes (which were taken once a week) to presumably rehearse her scene with Mona. Humbert though is reluctant to believe so and not even the confirmation of her friend assures him. In fact, Mona’s answer only convinces him of the plan the two of them had agreed on. All the yelling and the grasping and the harsh words determined Lolita to escape the house and run along the streets with Humbert trying to find her. He did, eventually, and returned home with her under the agreement they would once again go on the road wherever she would choose.

If Humbert had known, if he had at least suspected the outcome of his decision, things might have ended up differently; but he did. One thing at a time, though, they left their home on a Sunday morning to embark “on a long happy journey”. Typical motel rooms with twin beds, late mornings and coffees on the go became trademarks of their extended trip. But, this time, something was different and Humbert could sense it, although he was unable to figure out at the moment what was going on. He started suspecting that Lolita was in touch with someone and that she was giving clues to that person of their whereabouts, but he could not make himself sure of anything. Then, following a route to the west, Humbert realized they were being followed. His belief enforced as he saw Lo speaking at a gas station to a man whom she responded very familiar “as if they had known each other—oh, for weeks and weeks”. Not long after that, during a stop at the Post Office and while Humbert was going through Lolita’s letters, she suddenly vanished from his sight and it occurred to him that Lo had run away forever, but the moment wasn’t there yet. She claimed to have met a “Beardsley girl” and spent the twenty eight minutes (while she was absent) with her. That incident and finding the number of the plates of the car who had been following them (which Humbert had written down), all unrecognizable on the piece of paper, were the final attributes to make him explode. He stopped the car and slapped her to let out all the anguish and fury he had accumulated.

But Humbert’s “persecution” was far from being over. He accepted with much confinement their continuously chase by the same man whom he believed was a detective, on the quest of exposing the abuse directed at Lolita. He could not have been more wrong! More entwined by her nymph-ness than ever, Humbert failed to recognize the signs of Lolita’s desire to part from him. But, for a while, things seemed to sharpen up and they continued their travels. Only that, upon reaching a place named Elphinstone, Lola fell sick with a “virus affection” that kept her in hospital for a good few days. And, in the last of those days, the unpredictable (or wasn’t it?) happened. Humbert called the hospital one morning only to find out that Lolita had been checked out by her uncle Gustave who was to take her to “Grandpa’s ranch, as agreed”.

So Humbert started another round of trips, this time alone and with the sole purpose of destroying his “brother”. He started tracing the steps to his pursuer which, he will find, had left clues for Humbert, clues that helped in shaping some sort of personality image of the first. The whole search quest had taken him three years, lots of turbulence and no results. Humbert finally resigned and tried to end this chapter by disposing anything related to Lolita, “dusting” his car and belongings of all her things. But no matter how strong emotions and desires Lolita had stirred in Humbert, not even the grief of losing her had the power to cure his predilection for nymphets, as he would admit.

He moved on with Rita, a woman bearing three quarters of his age and who, as he would put it, was “the most soothing, the most comprehending companion”. They “toured” California, finally settling in New York and started sharing a flat. His memories of the nymphet though hadn’t completely dissolved and, sometimes, his eyes would play tricks on him when looking at the letter-box of his home: he would gaze at the letters and, all of a sudden, the handwriting would seem as belonging to Lolita. And it was on one particular day that his eyes indeed fixed on a piece of paper containing a message from her: she had married, was expecting and needed money for her family’s debts.

Needless to say, Humbert took the road to meet his fair nymphet, but was only greeted by “the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo” of her. Nevertheless, he acknowledged once more his love for “this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child” who was to reveal to him the details of her past escape. She confided that, back then, she had left with the man named Clare Quilty, the same man they had both met while staying at The Enchanted Hunters hotel so many years ago, the very same man that the play in which Lolita was supposed to star in (while at Beardsley) belonged to, someone who had actually been a friend of her mother back in the days. Oh, but he hadn’t been just a fling, no, Lolita had been terribly in love with the man. He had actually remained her only love, as she would confess to the troubled and pained Humbert. But things had gone wrong. “Cue” had turned out to be (not to her surprise or to anyone’s for the matter) a little girl adorer and a bit of a sex freak. He had disposed himself of Lolita when she refused to indulge to his “weird, filthy, fancy” appetites. After that, she had taken on some restaurant jobs and finally met Dick, whom she married and that was all. As far as her recollection of what she had lived with Humbert, there was nothing there but the faint memory of a “dull party”. And that is how the story of Humbert and Lolita comes to an end. Their story, that is, but there is still to say about the event that led to Humbert’s imprisonment.

With scenes of him and Lolita from a distant past passing through his mind, Humbert drove his old car to the place of his redemption, Ramsdale. There he would find the Quilty he had heard of so much, the same whom he remembered himself even. A kind of drugged man responded wearily to Humbert’s questions, like he had no clue of what was about to happen to him. Humbert was determined to make Quilty aware as to “the why” of his punishment. The whole scene up to the final moment of Quilty’s death is rather dazzling and pathetic. There he was, the man who had stolen Lolita from him, deeply hypnotized by some elusive drugs of his personality and unable to fully comprehend his fatal destiny. With bullets penetrating his skin, the so called kidnapper caught a glimpse of the seriousness of the matter and portrayed before Humbert’s eyes a promised life of indulging at the expense of sparing a life, his life, Quilty’s. But his fate had been already decided and it was only a matter of time now before it was all over. He died by Humbert’s hand and at Humbert’s wish.

I have, at last, revealed the reason for Humbert to have been imprisoned. I have also reached the final stage of the story and the last page of the book. Has it all been said? No, probably not. Remnants of moments, feelings and memories are to remain within pages and the minds of the readers. It makes it all the more difficult to close the book, because you feel like you can’t. You know you have to, the story is over, but you simply can’t. So you gaze on trying to explain to yourself what emotions run through you, now that you know what it is all about. But it’s not that easy, because this is not an easy story to analyze. Indeed, this is a story of two people together, this is also the story of two people taken separately but, most of all, it is the story within a story, the kind it dwells on, long after it has been read.

I.3. Incomprehensible Lolita: on the controversy and the fascination effects

“Mr. Nabokov may not have meant to move hearts, but he moved mine. He may not have meant to affect minds, but he did affect my mind”, declared Lionel Trilling during a televised discussion with the host of the program and the author of a particular book. The book, of course, was Lolita and the author was no one else than Vladimir Nabokov himself.

Trilling had not been the only one subdued by the book or, should we say, by the story. I feel it is somehow strange to name Lolita a book under the circumstances (it is nevertheless one), because it goes beyond that; you don’t just finish reading the pages, close the book, put it on a shelf somewhere and be done with it. What it does is that it causes readers to relive what it has been narrated by the author over and over again, because mixed feelings of fascination and controversy is what the story rouses most in people. And, indeed, this part of my paper deals not so much with the book, but with the story comprised within it.

When I say controversy and fascination I refer to these terms as the effects that the story has had on people ever since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. In regards to fascination, I speak of it as the cause that led people into creating their own piece of art inspired by the story. As to the controversy, I would tend to believe it is a product of the human mind’s analytical capacity to catalog things. Throughout the times, societies have constructed their own set of values and beliefs and any aspect of such a society would have been submitted to a process of standardization within these values. It’s the reason why not only Lolita, but so many other books were initially forbidden from reaching the masses.

If Lolita had appeared some fifty years later, it is my opinion that it might not have stirred the “hurricane” it did in the 1950’s. The two thousand bared the stigma of an already modernized society and chances are that Lolita would have circulated freely and maybe not so infamously perceived. But, taking that into account, this infamous character that accompanied the book for a period of time, may be partly the reason why the story would determine so many critics to analyze it for years to come, so many playwrights to “stage” it and two directors to make movies based on the story. It has gone so far as to people publishing a response to Humbert’s narration. Diario di Lo (Lo’s Diary) is a book by the Italian author Pia Pera who uses Nabokov’s story to create a version of “a scheming 12-year-old seductress, a selfish young thing who determines to snare a handsome older man from her hated mother”. Nabokov’s son, Dmitri had actually tried to stop the book from being published in English by issuing a lawsuit on claims of copyright, financial loses and how this new “Diary” would negatively shadow his father’s Lolita. But in the end, a settlement between the two was signed and Pera’s novel could reach the States and Britain.

We know though that Lolita wasn’t published in the twenty first century, but in a time when moral standards still prohibited even a slight sight of what was catalogued as obscene. The story of a man who fancied young girls and the portrayal of such a man having sexual relationships with a 12-year-old could not have been seen in any way but distorted by that society. Nabokov himself must have at least once suspected the outcomes of publishing a book with such a “peculiar” subject. It’s not so much about how a thing like that could not have been possible at all, but about the fact that people dreaded speaking of such matters, let alone making them public and inviting them into their homes. I believe the society back then was rather chaste when having to deal with sex as a wide open subject. Add to that a grown man who is having intercourse with a young, very young female and you have yourself a controversial topic. Speaking about sex and studying eroticism wasn’t though something that didn’t happen at all around the 1950’s. Alfred Kinsey was an American scientist, among the first to research human sexual behavior and who published related studies in 1948 and 1953. Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex at the dawn of the nineteen century was the first paper to treat the topic of sex in an objective manner. In fairness, we see that, in regards to a scientific view, sex had found the researchers who tried to establish a perfectly normal characteristic to it. And it is often believed that, thanks to the works of such scientists, a book like Nabokov’s was all the more possible to be bred.

While Nabokov constantly emphasized on Lolita not being a sex book, many have regarded it just as such, a story written with a hint of “refined depravity” and exposing “highbrow pornography”. In Orvile Prescott’s opinion, not only was the book repulsive because of its sexual perversity, but he also condemned Humbert for his “self consciously ornate and wonderfully tiresome prose style”, subsequently accusing Nabokov for passing “the artistic danger line of madness” when describing such “a perversion with the pervert’s enthusiasm”. Prescott’s opinion though was not shared by everyone. Mr. Lionel Trilling did recognize Lolita as a “very erotic book”, but never did he call it pornographic. To him, Lolita represented “the story of the love of a man in his forties for a girl of twelve”, a story that does shock by making “a prolonged assault on one of our unquestioned and unquestionably sexual prohibitions”, but would be far from initiating a sexual revolution in which pedophilia might take “a rational and respectable form of heterosexuality”.

The reason why I’ve included these very two testimonies here is precisely because I wanted to expose how the controversy and the fascination were played at. These two opponent opinions were only a small part of what eventually turned into a phenomenon. The line between those who would praise Lolita for its artistic merit and the ones who would dismiss it because of its nature never grew any thinner. The scales might have inclined more to the first and less to the latter or the other way around at one given moment, but the book has never unanimously been accepted or dismissed.

Lolita fitted just well into the bestseller’s list and maintained its position for a year with readers having as many controversial opinions as being no less fascinated by the story. If the controversy is explained by the sexual theme in the book, I would like to indicate how the fascination of the readers could have been motivated by a series of facts. First of all, we should consider that anything bearing a censorship maneuver has often caused people to be excited. It is particularly the topics that are not made public the ones that are most likely to spread faster in a sort of underground manner. That being said, Lolita was never actually banned from being published in the U. S., it was only the publishers who refused to “lodge” it. It was however prohibited in France after its publication but, soon after that, Lolita reclaimed its status of a “free book”. This, in my opinion, must have only made people wanting to know more what all the fuss was about. All the censorship had actually helped create a certain aura around Lolita’s existence. And whether or not the purchasers believed to have spent their money on something valuable, it didn’t really matter anymore. Either pro or against, the book was being passed orally from one to another. That, in itself, is a product of fascination as much as controversy.

Another thing worth mentioning and I cannot say for sure that it is valid for everyone, but the fact that Humbert presents his story on a first person narration does seem to transmit the impression that he would actually stand face to face with the reader and would open his soul, his mind, his very being to him. Nabokov issued the story with a false inspiration from true events. As one would remember, there is a foreword attached to the story signed under the name of a John Ray Jr. who explains the whereabouts of receiving Humbert’s confession. The fact that he tells of Humbert’s death and how he explicitly asked for the manuscript not to be published prior to his death, enforces the reader into the idea that what he is about to read is inspired by real life events. J.R. also states that the real identities of the characters had been protected by the one and the same author of the confession and the protagonist of the story, who chose to invent some names for them. Who could tell, after reading this statement, and assuming no other connections with Lolita have been established earlier, that the story isn’t “the real thing”? Naturally, after one has finished reading the book, certain intrigues may lead the person to investigate more on the novel. He or she would eventually find out that Nabokov never based his story on a real life event. Why, then, would he choose to present the book like he had had? Maybe to produce shock or to lure the readers into something deeply emotional and leave them tantalizing afterwards, who really knows? But it does make the reader want to involve more in the story and it does fascinate him to know, for a moment, at least, that it had all happened as told.

I believe the reader could also be led into fascination because of Humbert’s style of confessing. How he expresses himself leads the reader to almost not wanting to establish the middle aged man as a sexual pervert or abuser, the latter being mostly true. Because his descriptions of the intercourses and his goings with Lolita are so tenderly exposed, the reader might find it hard to view Humbert as a twisted man. What twisted man could ever be so tender and warm in expressing himself? The very act of H. H. admitting to his own abusive character would be as strong as to determine one to half “forgive” him. I would like to expand this by indicating that the effect of closeness is also empowered by the requests which Humbert directly addresses to the jury: to remember, imagine and guess the information received. These approaches towards the public are made under the most familiar tone almost as if the readers would actually have the power to transcend the pages of the book and transpose themselves into Humbert’s story. Whether or not Humbert had used this appealing tone merely to manipulate the reader into believing his story, hoping the jury would exempt him from the statute of a pedophile, remains subjective.

Lolita is a book of the present, more than half a century since its first publication. People talk about it on forums, conferences are being organized every so often and contests are still arranged for people to prove their ongoing fan statutory. John Bertram, creator of the Lolita Cover Project, is among those who remember Lolita as “an innocent child and a victim of abuse, not a seductress or a femme fatale”. Dieter E. Zimmer is a German writer and publicist who is fascinated with Nabokov also. On his website, those interested can find among all sorts of information regarding Nabokov’s life and work, “an online exhibit” of the covers that Lolita has had throughout fifty six years and thirty seven countries. It is this very exhibit that drove Bertram to initiate the Lolita Cover Contest. He declared that “finding so many of them… so wrong in so many ways was fascinating, but also upsetting” to the point when he felt the need to “to set the record straight”. His curiosity had driven him to see how artists would project their perception of the book on a cover, specifically since this wasn’t just any book, but a “controversial and difficult” one with “plenty of challenges to a designer”. The project itself turned into something bigger eventually and the covers created by the seventy five graphic designers that Bertram approached outside the project took the form of a book named Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl (to be published this year).

What I discovered is that if some people have tried to deal with Lolita by talking about it, competing for it or solemnize it, others have transformed it into a subculture. Somewhere in the late 1970’s, the Japanese established the term lolicon for describing erotic doujinshi, but the term could have also encompassed Anime and videos or games. The lolicon is understood as the sexual attraction of mostly men towards pre-pubescent, pubescent and even post-pubescent girls. The manga lolicon are often images representing childish girls either naked or in various erotic postures. The phenomenon spread so widely in Japan that parents and authorities felt the need to control it by enforcing the law. While critics have expressed their concern that it might contribute to the sexual abuse of children, there are those who claim this form of art would only seek to emphasize on precocious beauty and, since “no identifiable minor is involved in the production of lolicon”, the conclusion could be drawn that “no physical harm is done”. Pictures of naked girls were actually used in advertisements and, by late 1980’s, the situation had developed into such a popular phenomenon that people began wondering about the normality around the lolicon addiction. Several countries have taken extreme measures when dealing with lolicon manga and a 27-years-old man was actually arrested in Canada in 2011, presumably carrying pornographic manga child art on his computer.

I have reached the conclusion that the “Lolita complex” is a somehow wider phenomenon. While it includes the lolicon aspect, it can also refer to other areas. For example, Japan also initiated a fashion subculture with girls or even young adult women dressing as children or dolls and the movement is known under the name of Gothic and Lolita (G&L). Though the concept of the style is rather directed at the cuteness of it, the name resemblance has often caused people to attach a sexual connotation to it. The Lolita appearance is said to be adopted by women who wish to return to their child-ness and it does not strive to be associated with the kind of Lolita that some people perceive from reading the book: a sexually matured “nymphet”. Neither the lolicon, nor the fashion subculture is a direct effect of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, since both of them are rooted way back. It was actually Alice who helped form the fashion style and Lolita was only used to name it. The lolicon name does appeal to the character in the eponymous (already mentioned) book, but it has developed into this form only after Russell Trainer’s publication of The Lolita Complex in the 1960’s, published in Japan in the ‘70’s. The issue of lolicon is highly debated in Japan and other countries alike. The Japanese were still fighting in 2010 for the official emit of an anti-lolicon law, but were fight back by the manga artists and fans, so the matter is still under debate today.

Much of the controversy surrounding Lolita has dissipated more nowadays due to people having access to more studies regarding the sexual behavior of human beings and psychiatrics who can’t seem to stress enough that pedophilia is a mental health problem which can be treated and the treatment could actually help the pedophile before he would even attempt to implicate himself in a crisis (crisis as an attack on a child). Or maybe there is less controversy now regarding the sexual implications in the story because so much has been said and there is nothing more to reply to the matter. Whichever the case, beyond the controversy, there is still the fascination that explains the atemporality of Lolita. There are most likely people who’ve never read the book or have never heard of the story and the ones who did hear and did read the book and decided to reread it. It is said that a book chooses the reader and not the other way around, as most of us like to believe. If that is true, then Lolita has chosen well. It was clever enough to be passed on from under the counters of French libraries when it was banned and quite sharp to be partly published in the 1950’s magazines in America, just enough for people to catch a glimpse of its nature.

As I’ve proved, now, as it did then, Lolita can still stir up debates and be the topic of discussions, either scholarly or just in a rendezvous among friends. Maybe this is due to the various approaches that the fans can adhere to and some of the intrigues are quite related to the life of the two main characters Humbert and Lolita, for they are those who illuminate the story, after all.

Chapter II. The reflected world within the story of two people

II.1. Finding Nabokov beyond Humbert

II.1.1. Understanding Humbert

We are Humbert’s jury. Every reader, every critic, all of us have blamed him, convicted him and set him free so many times, only for the trial to begin once more with another critic and another reader. And why have we done so? Was Humbert’s real intention to confess his taking advantage of Lolita in hope for redemption and did he gamble his dazzling written speech to grant him absolution from everything he did to achieve his goals? Could it be the jury felt manipulated for actually not wanting to blame Humbert and finally, the need to “do something” about that prevailed and he has been regarded ever since as a magnificent scholarly pedophile? In the following, I shall try to answer these questions, though the matter remains subjective, much as Humbert’s confession and it depends on the side each and every one of us is standing. Are you among the ones who’ve blamed him or are you the one who’s set Humbert free? Maybe we’re all just a little bit of both and no mistake can be made about it; Humbert has had his say on this and did he lose any time in attracting the reader right into his inner world? I believe not, especially when I consider his passionate outset of the confession: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul”.

Because Lolita is seen through Humbert’s eyes, we have no other choice but to follow his lead in the story and in fact, our only possibility to analyze Humbert is by relating him to Lolita and his feelings for her. Although he writes his memoirs to praise his love for Lolita and makes her the absolute center of his writings, it is nevertheless his story that we are witnessing. But Humbert chose not to expose himself completely to “the jury” and the “bizarre cognomen” revealed by the fictional John Ray in the few pages preceding the story, creates a mask under which the protagonist apparently decided to envelop himself. Could he then be taken for granted in everything he confesses, given also the falsifying of names, which allegedly has been decided on his part “as not to hurt people” but knowing that when he refers to his own pseudonym, Humbert has chosen it for it “expresses the nastiness best”?

In relation to that and some other aspects in Humbert’s presentation of “facts”, some critics have established him as unreliable. The term “unreliable narrator” has been introduced for the first time by Wayne Booth in Rhetoric of Fiction in which a narrator is reliable “when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not”. That is to say, Humbert’s version is deemed to be looked at with suspicion because it contradicts the implied author’s (which is Nabokov’s) norms. We know that Nabokov declared having nothing in common with Humbert’s set of values and moreover, being in conflict with some of his ideas. Thus, we can place his unreliability within the context of Humbert’s own contradictions in the text when describing himself as “a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory” after he had previously declared himself as “a very conscientious recorder”. That he would have had the “artist’s duty” to tell events just as they happened and to position them in the right time seems as something unreliable coming from a man with an “incomplete memory”.

Humbert has also proven to readers that he would go as far as lying without second thought in order to facilitate his ways of having Lolita. Fearsome that telling the girl of her mother’s death right away might swerve his plan from possessing her while she was drugged up in the room at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, Humbert deliberately waited the next day to tell the truth. Prior to that, he had deceived Jean and John, two family friends, into believing he was the paternal father of Lolita, who had been presumably conceived with Charlotte during a business trip he had taken to the States in the time when the woman was married. Also, let us bear in mind that Humbert wrote his confession while in prison, awaiting trial and with his state of health deteriorating rapidly. For him, to have written about three hundred pages in approximately two months must have not been easy at all, giving the imprisoned conditions too and it is my belief his memory might have failed him once or twice.

I’ve pointed out in the first paragraph how Humbert introduces the reader directly into the midst of his turmoil, by passionately remembering Lolita whom he no longer held at his side at that moment. Throughout his telling, he would use many more other techniques to keep the attention of the reader focused and sometimes to divert that attention from his “perverted” personality towards the like of a psychological ill man who is to be excused of his sins. So he would have appealed to his self conscious style of writing much to the benefit as to the manipulation of the reader as well as to exonerate himself of the remnant shadows of his deeds. His direct approach towards the reader is “to produce an effect of blurring of frontiers between fiction and reality”, an idea which is expanded further when Humbert explicitly encourages the reader not only “to take note but actually to take action”, trying to reassure the public on the credibility of the facts presented by him. And on the attempt to be exonerated, he sees his readers as his own jurors and it is under these circumstances that I believe Humbert wrote his memoirs, to obtain, if not exemption, at least a slightly reduced punishment. Though sometimes grounded with remorse of having deprived Lolita from leading a normal life and being a normal girl, Humbert tries to elude from taking full responsibility of his actions:

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?…I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

I believe that by attempting to define Annabel as the forerunner for his sexual cravings, Humbert is creating his own scenery of redemption in which he alone can no longer be held accountable for his actions but further analyses by the jury and the readers (who become one and the same on some occasions) is required for a full comprehending of the matter. He tries to offer some basis for his sexual attraction by “introducing the idea” in a rather excusable manner that:

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets”.

He goes on in trying to exonerate himself by pointing how, in some parts of India, marriage between a grown man and a prepubescent girl is “still” quite normal and “Lepcha old men of eighty copulates with girl of eight, and nobody minds”. Furthermore, he generalizes on how the attraction of men towards much younger girls has been as ancient as time when “Dante fell madly in love with Beatrice when she was nine, in 1274, in Florence… and when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, a fair haired nymphet of twelve”, and if his precursors have been through the same emotions and have felt the same attractions and were forgiven and remembered with courtesy, maybe he could make himself worthy of the same treatment if only could he search in the depths of his most inner being an openly confess his sins.

What I am trying to show is that, though Humbert would be willing to accept his implication in deviating Lolita’s normal childhood, he cannot do so fully and confides to the “frigid gentlewomen of the jury” with the “very strange” fact that Lolita had actually seduced him first and expresses his surprise further on, upon finding he had not been “her first lover”. To John Wasmuth, Humbert’s surprise to find that Lolita had been already sexually introduced by the Charlie boy at camp would only serve as a defending mechanism from his part after the guilt of possessing Lolita. But the fact that Humbert mentions how Lolita had been deflowered by someone else other than him is not to absolve him of any crime whatsoever. It would indeed accuse him even more because, according to Duana Bonney, though “Lolita may not have been physically chaste, she was unaware that physical relations mean something different to adults than to kids” and this had been something of which Humbert was well aware of, but still he decided “to take full advantage of this innocence” and then tried to convince the reader that “nothing had been taken from her” by pointing he had not even been her first lover.

Humbert plays both the role of the controller and of the controlled in his relationship with Lolita. I’ve already mentioned his lying techniques he committed himself to for “capturing” Lolita. He would resort to similar actions in the future as well by threatening Lolita that she could be sent to a juvenile home and lose all hope of indulging in her hobbies, if she denounced Humbert to the police. Later on, it’d be her turn to set the rules as she becomes aware of the situation in which Humbert has put them both and tries to gain from his sexual endeavors as much material and financial support as possible, only to eventually flee into the unknown with Quilty.

In the light of what I have presented, we have come to know Humbert as unreliable, manipulative and able to go as far as possible in achieving his goals. How far is that, though? True, he did play with the idea of murdering Charlotte to have Lolita at his disposal which eventually need not be done as fate would have arrange that for him, and he does make a murderer of himself when killing Quilty so brutally, but maybe this final act could be understood as an act of surrendering in front of the same fate who gave first and took later.

II.1.2. From Nabokov to Humbert, similarities

One way of looking at Lolita has been, for some, to regard it as a metaphor for an America versus Europe allusion. To do so would have meant to discover the grounds for such a statement. That Nabokov has projected his own ideas and values within his writings is a commonly known fact and it is also common for most of the writers. His consciousness is able to depict a second “real” world within the pages of his novels, a world that he has all the freedom to create based on the values familiar to him from his own encounters with life. Because the plot in Nabokov’s novels “simultaneously conceals and refers to an authorial consciousness beyond the text”, people have wondered about the connections between him and Humbert. Various suppositions have circulated in time on whether or not Nabokov had even shared Humbert’s passion for nymphets. I will stop for a brief moment to analyze “the why” that lead people into thinking so.

“Colette” is a story by Nabokov and published in July 1948 and it is also his recollection of a summer trip he and his family went on in 1909, in Biarritz. Colette (whose real name is Claude Deprès) is introduced to the reader two pages after the author makes a thoroughly remembrance of the train journey from St. Petersburg to Biarritz, in southern France. The girl he met there would make quite an impression to the 10-year-old boy who keeps his memories of her intact up to the age of maturity. Some critics have tied Humbert’s first love on the Riviera with the love Nabokov had felt for his nine year old Colette, in trying to assemble a puzzle on the author’s personality. Nabokov himself dismissed such claims, specifying the clear differences between the two: not so much the age difference (Humbert is thirteen when falling for Annabel and Nabokov ten), but the love comparison: while Humbert was engaged in possessing his first love physically, the love of the young couple had been fairly innocent and pure, the likes of which could only be experienced when “nothing whatsoever about the false facts of life” is known.

I have found no link to prove that Nabokov had created Humbert in order to project upon him his own grief for losing Colette. Since the author himself never admitted to such a thing (and even if it were remotely true I don’t think Nabokov would have admitted it), there is no real base to sustain the idea. It all remains an ambiguous presupposition. And if it’s one thing Nabokov is highly appreciated for, it is exactly his ambiguous style not only of writing, but when expressing himself as well.

However, I believe some similarities do exist in the concept of Humbert and Nabokov both being European natives and in their conception of American culture. Let us remember the two of them have emigrated, though under different circumstances and from different countries. And, as such, they both had to adapt their own culture to a new one. The reason for Nabokov and Humbert to immigrate to America had somehow been inflicted on both of them. Nabokov first left Germany for France in 1947 as a result of the Nazis taking control over the country and in an attempt to protect his wife who had a Jewish background. And in 1940, as the Germans invaded Paris, the couple and their only son were forced to leave the French city for New York this time. Humbert however, decided to leave for America after receiving an inheritance from an uncle of his, who would only make him the beneficiary of his estate under the condition of coming to the States. So neither Nabokov, nor Humbert had freely decided to part with their European countries and neither of them had found it so easy to adapt to this new setting.

Upon admitting it had taken him “some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe” – referring to his works prior to his emigration, Nabokov also faced the challenge of “a similar task, with a lesser amount of time” when creating Lolita in America. He had not felt so prepared at the time to transpose this new culture – of which he had only a slight knowledge of – into an imaginary world when he first started writing the piece and his “second-rate brand of English” would not have helped him much either. Humbert also found himself estranged from this new cultural background and, along the travels he undertook with Lolita, he would tie certain aspects of American culture with remnants of European memories, like “those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central European nurseries”. I’ve also observed how Humbert would use the visions of other European artists in describing the American landscapes. In the scene where Humbert makes a reference to the “Claude Lorrain clouds”, Christine Bouvart signalizes “a past endowed with historical significance whose weight is so important that it obscures the present”, where the past is viewed as his European legacy in comparison to the American immigration. Further on, Humbert’s comparison of the cornfields of Kansas with the likes of a “stern El Greco horizon” is due to confirm his inadequacy in America, according to the same Christine Bouvart. Both Lorrain’s and El Greco’s paintings have been referred to as nostalgic and including some magical elements to them. That Humbert would use their visions of art to describe America’s surroundings makes me even more certain of his own nostalgia regarding his native backgrounds and emphasizes his incapability or unwillingness to change the latter for the first.

I’ve also found some other particular features of Nabokov imprinted on Humbert. First, there is the matter of music. Although it was a prominent component in Nabokov’s family life with his cousin being a famous composer and his own son a tenor, the author constantly admitted:

I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I attend a concert – which happens about once in five years – I endeavour gamely to follow the sequence and relationships of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impression, reflection of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bad spot over a fiddle, these take over, and soon I am bored without measure by the motions of the musicians.

Obviously, the statement speaks for itself, but we do have to keep in mind that music is very much present in Lolita and the fact is, some information must have passed Nabokov’s ears if it made it all through the novel. However, the general idea I look for here is whether or not some expressions of Nabokov regarding music can be found within the lines of Humbert’s testimony. When asked in an interview about what he liked and disliked, Nabokov answered in a most franking manner: “My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting”. It comes to no surprise that Nabokov had included music, be it “soft”, into his knapsack hard to carry items. Interesting enough, Humbert portrays a similar kind of nuisance towards soft music when he admits to finding Lolita’s habits and passions rather “disgusting” and “conventional”:

Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth—these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I still hear the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading here, people with names like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Guy and Patty and Rex, and sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various candies were to my palate.

Comparing his unfamiliarity regarding “sentimental” music with Lo’s taste for sweets and the fact that he did not share it does prove, at least for this kind of music, his lack of interest and passion about it. And it is actually these small features that tie Nabokov to Humbert so much, in my opinion. Going back to the likes and the dislikes of Nabokov, let’s recall him saying how writing is among the “most intense pleasures known to man”. It would be worth mentioning the similarity of professions between the two. Both Nabokov and Humbert had been brought up in wealthy families and were given exclusive education, with the first being a “perfectly normal trilingual child” and the latter a quite happy one exposed to different cultures as well. While Elena Ivanovna, “a noble and wealthy Russian with an artistic heritage” would have passed on to Nabokov “a creative sensibility and innate spirituality”, Humbert had not been so lucky to grow up with his mother by his side. However, after her death, it was Sybil, her older sister who took on the role of governess for the little boy and Humbert remembers her penchant for writing poetry, also his father reading to him Don Quixote and Les Miserables. So both Nabokov and Humbert had been exposed from an early age to the intellectual life. And both recall their childhood with great fondness and regard a special kind of feeling for their home place. Nabokov had been asked in an interview on why he did not own his private house in America and chose to wander from motels to rented houses all throughout the twenty years he spent there and he responded how “nothing sort of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me”. Humbert also fondly recalls his growing up “in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces” when introducing his backgrounds for the confession. It is also interesting to bond the trips of Humbert and Lolita around the States with Nabokov’s own troubadour-ness and draw a parallel between the lives of the two, who would eventually both become intellectuals with a very appealing style of writing, the same ambiguity and similar taste of American culture.

As far as the similarities between Humbert and Nabokov appearing unsubstantial, I maintain the idea they do exist and maybe Nabokov hasn’t made them obvious to the reader but, then again, this is not something he would normally submit himself to.

II.2. Splitting Lolita’s personality

There are various interpretations which have been given to Lolita. She has long been regarded as both the seduced and manipulated little girl and as the seducer and manipulative nymphet. Studies have tried a depersonalization, after previously attempting to personify her as the post-war image of American youth. Deep diving within the roots of her name has been stretched beyond the general representational meaning of Lolita. On same occasions, she may even appear, to the very common readers, as somehow intangible. Now, my understanding of a “common” reader is, within this context, the reader who would choose to merely surface the lecture and not dig deeper into the ambiguity depicted within the story by Nabokov. I believe the fascination inflicted on us isn’t by Humbert alone, but also reaches us through his “fresh and alive” little girl “nymphet”. In the previous chapter I’ve stated that our understanding of Lolita is accessible insofar as Humbert’s portrayal of her. But it would not stand as a contradiction to affirm there are actually a few other Lolitas in the novel that we have access to, just as there are two worlds depicted within almost all of Nabokov’s writings: the reality perceived and experienced by his characters and the mind that masters them which is the author himself. By stating there are “a few other Lolitas”, I refer not only to Humbert’s Lolita but also Nabokov’s and to the Lolita who has been created by a number of critics and readers alike, the seductive one, who isn’t regarded as innocent like both Humbert and Nabokov have created her. Since all of the above Lolitas are interwoven, I shall make no attempt to cut them apart completely, but will only emphasize the distinct characteristics among them.

I would like to start my investigation of Lolita’s “split personality” by introducing Nabokov’s description on how he came to choose her name:

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L”. The suffix “-ita” has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too…Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in “Dolores”. My little girl’s heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname “Haze”, where Irish mists blend with a German bunny–, I mean, a small German hare.

Neither this passage, nor any other statement from Vladimir Nabokov’s behalf has ever even suggested promiscuity in Lolita. Her creation was to be understood as a fun experiment within his own laboratory, as Nabokov declared, not as to imply a personification of America, but to simply breathe a “helpless and lovely” being to life. Nabokov’s care in choosing Lolita’s name is to me a clear evidence of his affection towards the girl and a form of expressing the whole sorrow within the novel. Lolita is, after all, the diminutive of Dolores which in Spanish is translated as pain and pain therefore becomes a theme by itself. Allow me to emphasize a little bit more on the values attached to the name.

It has been said that Lolita is actually a condensation of three stories: Herman Melville’s Omoo, Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee and Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen. To understand the correlation of these stories within Nabokov’s Lolita, I shall present in the following a few ideas around them. While the connection to Poe’s poem is very well obvious and since I’ve already introduced it in the previous chapter, my focus here is mainly directed at the other two. Both Omoo and Carmen are represented by their autobiographical structure but in neither of them do the presented events belong exclusively to the narrators, as it has been established they had assimilated some of them. In Omoo we are presented with the author’s personal experiences in the time when he was a crew member on a ship sailing across the Pacific and what ties Lolita to this novel is Loo, a Polynesian girl of fourteen years of age who lives on an island and becomes the nymph of Melville’s doctor friend. Suzzane Fraysse ties Loo’s “hazel” eyes to the family name Haze which Humbert invents for his nymphet. According to her, the Lo in Lolita is an assimilation of Melville’s nymph’s name, Loo. She goes further to explain that Loo’s father’s name, translated into English as Jeremiah-in-the-dark might have served as an inspiration for Nabokov’s Juanita Dark. And the translation of the father’s name in Polynesian being Ereemar Po-Po, Humbert’s allusion to the author Poe becomes evident and so the Lee in Lo-lee-ta could be tied to Annabel Lee. In Carmen, the narrator becomes acquainted with a fictional José Maria, a bandit who steals from the rich to give to the poor and falls for a bewitching gypsy whom he eventually murders because of her infidelities, and surrenders himself to the police afterwards. Thus, the –ta in Lolita would be a reference to the Carmencita diminutive, since one rhymes with the other. However, it is not an idea embraced by the majority because Humbert doesn’t eventually murder Lolita.

I sustain the idea of Nabokov’s three nymphets standing at the base of Lolita’s own creation much to the idea of discovering the author’s literary allusions in the text regarding her. Moreover, since we are introduced to the melodic resonance of the name right within the first sentence in the novel with such a powerful force, I draw the conclusion that Lolita is indeed the center of the story though as not in the figure of the character itself but more likely as a puzzle which needs to be assembled for the bigger picture to become available. Lolita is thus for Nabokov an instrument in the hands of the “good” reader who is issued with a responsibility to read between the lines and bring his own contribution to the literary domain, whereas Humbert’s Lolita is his own instrument of redemption. The many faces of Lolita, ranging from Lo to Lola, to Dolly, Dolores and vice versa whenever needed are to imply continuous metamorphoses of the girl along the script of the novel depending on the values attached to each scene when presented.

The idealized image of Lolita which Humbert paints so passionately is in my opinion the instrument by which he counterbalances his self accused actions. By lifting Lolita up a pedestal he actually seeks to gain redemption himself. So his vision of Lolita might not be the real face of her since Humbert is blinded by his lusts. If “the ‘actual’ Lolita is the person we see Humbert can’t see”, than who she really is must be seen across the narrator’s descriptions and perceptions. Her magic is durable so long as Humbert keeps wrapping her in magic dust but once the story is finished, the reader is bound to look back at what he has just read and find deeper realities hidden beyond the fictional reality of Humbert’s narration. A closer look might reveal to some “a rather common, unwashed little girl whose interests are entirely plebian” and whose being is molded into a form of art only by the narrator’s talented skills. That Lolita had been substituted for something she was actually not is an idea also portrayed by David Andrews when writing how, the first time Humbert saw Lolita, it had not been the real girl he had caught a glimpse of but that of “a subhuman nymphet”, a trace of Annabel Leigh and “Dolores Haze, it seems, is what gets lost in the translation”.

There is another aspect I would like to draw the attention on and that is the sexual feature attached to the nymphet by Humbert which is sometimes implied by him as one of an experienced and self-aware seductress (“I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.”) while all the long remaining perfectly aware of how she really perceived the nature of sex (“She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults.”). Lolita’s unawareness in respects to the adult’s connotations of sex is the very acknowledgement of her limited sexual experiences and undiscovered personal power of sexuality. I emphasize still on this idea by remembering Humbert’s first “honey of a spasm” when, having Lolita in his lap, the Sunday the two of them were alone in the house, he used this moment of closeness to achieve an orgasm without her even slightly intercepting his act of masturbation. It is within this scene that he creates “another fanciful Lolita – perhaps more real than Lolita”, a figure of imagination and as such to hurt his own creation would deem as unlikely. However, to some, this first moment of sexuality which Humbert stole from Lolita represents the first actual evidence of the girl’s own game. Sarah Herbold wrote that “Humbert does not seem to be the only person who is enjoying himself here. Lolita may be not only having an orgasm but also orchestrating their mutual stimulation”. However understandable her vision of the act may seem given Lolita’s “cheeks aflame, hair awry” and her avoiding Humbert’s eyes (“her eyes passing over me as lightly as they did over the furniture”) which would go to show a hint of embarrassment on her part, it is my belief that she had actually tried to escape Humbert’s grasping but was unable to do so until the moment his “grip had eased” so as to free herself from it.

Humbert’s lust is actually what deprives him from a true understanding of the person Lolita who is unique in the sense of her being an individual with own core beliefs, thoughts and feelings and not merely the object of a man’s sexual fascination. By solely giving in to his cravings Humbert is bound to remain indifferent to Lolita’s reality and perception of life. One particular incident is relevant to sustaining the idea: when Humbert accompanies Lolita and one of her friends to a concert he hears her saying how “what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”, a depth in Lolita’s philosophy Humbert had never taken the time to succumb into, blinded as he had been by her nymphet-ness alone:

And it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.

As listeners of Humbert’s confession we might be inclined to, as well, dismiss Lolita for who she really is relying on solemnly his presentation of facts which has already been suspected as unreliable. It has often been the case with some critics even that by giving in to Humbert’s power of narration, they have jumped to conclusions in scolding Lolita’s behavior. Such attacks Vera Nabokov sought right to counteract by reminding readers of how “she [Lolita] cries every night and the critics are deaf to her sobs”. What other proof of Lolita’s suffering is there if not her own escape from the clutches of her stepfather? Surely, we cannot put her running away with Quilty at the expense of a simple fugitive romance. Assuming Lolita might have even willingly given in to Humbert’s sexual requests (not saying she had actually had), in the end, she had felt the need to escape the dungeon he closed her in anyway. However aware Humbert might have been in some moments of her imprisonment I emphasize on the fact that he would have probably never find it in his heart to free Lolita and she saw no other way to obtain this freedom but by running away. One could even blame Humbert for sealing Lolita’s fate, murdering her in the end, though not actually. Who she might have been if Humbert hadn’t engulfed her is now to be secluded for eternity. Her growing up so much faster than plenty of other girls of her age is also a factor which Humbert had contributed in one way or the other. He meets Lolita when she is twelve and merely within a year she becomes sexually active, first by experiencing intimacies with another girl and then with a Charlie boy at camp, afterwards with Humbert. She is forced to a life on the roads and to his possessing which she eventually escapes only to fall into the hands of Quilty, “a child adorer” himself and “a sex freak”. At seventeen she fatally dies while “giving birth to a steel born child”.

What I think Humbert mostly fails to see in Lolita is her spirit, her personal desires and to some extends her true suffering. Either that or he is simply unable to transcend his egocentric needs. I believe he actually envisions two Lolitas: the fiction of his lusting creation who (he wants to make himself believe) cannot be hurt and your average teenage American who fancies clothes and the modern lifestyle of movie stars. She is a rebel towards her mother and Humbert alike and to anyone else who would look to suppress her personality. On the other hand, her own mother rather rejects her than is able to understand and love Lolita so she resorts to sarcasm and peppered retorting to control her emotions. Her uniqueness is valid only through Humbert’s passion over her; in fact, her real image is nonetheless that of a “conventional” pre-teen girl. It is why she has been regarded by some as an emblem of the youth culture in America in those days.

It was around the beginning of the twentieth century that such a culture first started to be analyzed. The appearance on screen of Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor who started as child actors had set the world of teenagers in motion with attempts on imitating their style. The business field sought as an opportunity to invest in further attracting the consumerist market of teenagers by broadcasting films and shows revolving around youthful matters and by making available all sorts of attractive items such as jewelry and clothes, all of these having been previously available only to higher up class girls. Lolita is thus viewed as part of this new wave of middle class girls who look to indulge themselves in this new environment of material abundance. Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version of Lolita probably encompasses best all of these aspects. The red lipstick, the freedom of expression and her “fancy clothes” are trademarks of this new wave subculture girl so free in appearance so doomed within her spirit.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Humbert is not willing to accept this side of Lolita and transforms her by the likes of his writing art and imagination into a magical creature. Humbert’s “plain Lo in socks” is therefore “but a bland American teen with no interest whatsoever” while “Humbert transforms himself, not only in an observer, but indeed in a magician, who makes use of his acute sensibility to erase the unoriginal Dolores and give birth to the enchanted Lolita”. But to this enchanted Lolita he is merely the lover whereas he plays the role of a father to the Lolita representing the typical American teenager. He assimilates the status of a “dad” when warning Lolita of the outcomes if she would once seriously consider denouncing him to the police: “I am your daddum, Lo. Look, I’ve a learned book here about young girls…I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you”. These father-daughter moments however are an intrinsic effect of Humbert’s guilty conscience just as offering her all those American food and clothing items were a method of paying her off for obtaining sexual pleasures and just as not allowing her any freedoms of the normal teenagers “hanging out” type was a stratagem to temper his own jealousy.

In light of everything that’s been presented here it would seem as though imagining Dolores Haze is somehow difficult. Lolita’s version of the facts would be dependent of any reader’s response to her behavior and whether or not she holds part of the blame in Humbert’s erotic plans is solely up to anyone who opens the book. To me, she deems her relationship with Humbert in the beginning as merely part of a game in which she needs to teach her partner the things he had not experienced as a child. Her age is much too frail for her to comprehend the true involvement in a romantic affair at that particular time but as Humbert constraints her more and more to his sexual endeavors she actually drifts further and further apart from the world he had constructed around her. Lolita’s behavior towards him is misleading, so many times calling him a “brute”, “a dirty old man”, Humbert never really knowing if she is serious or not. Their relationship starts deteriorating at an even faster pace once they start living together and Lolita makes her first attempt to escape her persecutor then. By now, she would have fully understood the nature of their uncommon relationship and she would see no reason to remain at Humbert’s side since she “loathed” him. She plans her escape with Quilty and doesn’t look back when he picks her up from the hospital to take her to “Grandpa’s farm” and it would not be until two years after that she meets Humbert again.

With Lolita emerging at the dawn of the second half of the twentieth century so another idea was being looked at in a more serious manner. The teenage child was no longer just the victim of abuse, molestation and control but it seemed as though he was turning into these very weapons himself. There is a limit here which I wish to draw upon Lolita herself using certain weapons to gain certain favors from Humbert and it must not be understood as though she had decayed from the “legal rights” of a child down to a manipulative seductress brat. Most likely she had surrendered to the lifestyle which had been imposed on her and took things for what they were and didn’t realize it could be in any way different (better, if you wish). In Disclosing the Doubles, Elizabeth Patnoe makes a reference to a line in the book (“Well, you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola, C-O-L-A, cola.”) in trying to explain the duality of Lolita. In her opinion, “for some readers, Lolita is traumatic and depressing – like the alcohol in champagne – yet, for many others, it is pleasurable and stimulating – like the caffeine in cola”. I second that by (re) directing the statements towards Lolita, not the book, not the story but the girl, the nymphet and eventually the woman.

Chapter III. Unveiling Lolita

III.1. Good versus evil or about the ethics

What ever raised the issue of morality on Lolita? Why were the Americans so reluctant in publishing the book in the first place and what factors contributed to “hurricane Lolita”? These are but a few questions surrounding the story that I will seek an answer to in the following pages. Ever since its emergence, the book has caused a great deal of turbulence in the world of literature and criticism alike while general masses have found themselves identified at least partly with the story or some events within it. Reviews bearing titles such as “Lolita: Literature or Pornography” have seen the printed pages of those time media imposing some sort of influence on the audiences and nominations the likes of L’Affaire Lolita had given the book an international business like connotation. I would like to display here a specific case of one reader identifying herself with Lolita because her experience with the book might be revealing to all of us in the sense of pursuing an understanding of the moral factors around it. It is extracted from Elizabeth Patnoe’s work which I’ve already mentioned at the very end of the previous chapter. She had been herself the witness of the reader’s reaction and it apparently happened as she participated with a few other women in a “book talk” – the book Lolita. This is the event:

I witnessed how this book is not “just a book” for some people when, nestled in a booth one afternoon, some women and I began discussing the implications of Lolita. Three of us were especially passionate as we discussed its narrative strategy, its characterization, our responses. Our fourth colleague occasionally nodded her head, but remained quiet. About fifteen minutes into our talk, she abruptly rose to go home. The closest of her friends among us walked her to her car and upon her return told us why our colleague had gone: when she was a child, her father woke her, carried her from her bed to the bathroom, made her bend forward over the tub, and raped her. When she cried out, her father stuffed a washcloth in her mouth. With blood dripping down her legs, he forced her to perform fellatio on him. When she refused to swallow his semen, he squeezed her nostrils shut until she did. When he was finished, he picked her up by the elbows, held her face to the mirror, and said, “Do you know why Daddy did this to you? Because you are such a pretty pussy.”

Obviously, the story is deeply disturbing to me (and probably for the rest of you, as well), the mere observer of a written fact describing a woman’s molestation as a child; it is even more disturbing considering the molester had been the girl’s actual father. What Patnoe had intended by including her friend’s experience in her article was to show “how others might respond to texts and discussions that catapult them into chasms of deep, secret pains” when their own lives had been affected in the past by similar events or others “far less shocking” than Lolita. The reason why I’ve chosen to reveal it here has much to do with Lolita’s morals in tow. We need to understand that the subject of the book is disturbing by itself if we turn ourselves deaf to Humbert’s pleading voice and isolate the subject from Nabokov’s style of writing. Truth is, Humbert’s actions represent a violation of both rights and body on Lolita and however much we would “spin around the tail” and try to ignore the matter, Lolita’s sobbing is the very testimony of these violations. What truly makes Humbert and that girl’s father so different from one another anyway? It is my belief that the usage of language and tone of voice is actually the first thing that separates them, followed by the latter’s use of violence in comparison to the first’s more subtle approach.

The first impulse I had upon reading the woman’s experience had been to question the nature of parents and to think “what kind of a parent would do that to his own daughter?” and my disgust proved even stronger when the man revealed such a frankness in expression after he had finished his dirty deed and showed no remorse to have hurt his daughter in such a disturbed way afterwards. What makes me want to forgive Humbert for his acts on Lolita is indeed his own regret and because he holds himself accountable for depriving her of a normal childhood we would be willing to grant him absolution more easily than we would to someone who is not even aware of the damaged done. The two cases might be more different than similar in appearance but the final results are somewhat the same, suffering and abuse. So we can understand clearly now why Lolita would be “such a big thing” for some who might have experienced the same kind of attacks. To them, the story may appear as wrongfully biased since the jury doesn’t always incline in favor of the abused but towards the abuser which makes Lolita’s sense of morals questionable. What if society would come to easily accept such happenings on the ground of manipulative confession and based on the confessor’s skillfulness of storytelling? Just because Humbert chose subterfuges to many times possess Lolita and hasn’t used the kind of violence we’ve witnessed earlier to achieve his goals it doesn’t excuse him from what he has done, if we really come to think about it. We may know more facts on his story than on the other father’s one but the issue of morality is present in both of them. What Humbert is doing is that he is trying to absolve himself of his sins by embodying his sexual appetite in the veil of sentimental love for Lolita but this love proves weaker than his lust, as he always gives in to the latter. This way, his degenerated behavior could be regarded as a direct and an excusable consequence of the love he feels for Lolita. But before going deeper into the aspect of morality in and around Lolita let us stop and review for a moment the sexuality theme in Nabokov’s general art. For the subject of sex and the obsession of it has been present in Vladimir Nabokov’s works long before the initiation of Lolita.

To answer Humbert’s rhetorical question “Did she have a precursor” and following his rhetorical answer “She did, indeed she did”, I come forward in saying that Lolita’s sexual morality is actually an antecedent in the author’s earlier writings. However, from the protagonist in Mašen ‘ka (Mary, 1926) to The Enchanter (Volšebnik, 1939) we find in Nabokov’s Russian years a distinct approach towards his characters intimate moments in comparison to his English works. Certain allusions to lovemaking do appear in most of his Russian writings but actual scenes are never fully described or detailed. Nabokov lets his readers imagine these moments of closeness by merely introducing them: “In silence, his heart thumping, he leaned over her, running his hands along her soft, cool legs.” (Ganin in Mary), “[Martin] gazed lovingly at her bare, childish shoulders and blond bob, and felt completely happy.” (Martyn in Podvig (Glory)), other times just casually mentioning some tips to disclose the presence of sex within the novels. What Maxim D. Shrayer has observed is that Nabokov “euphemizes sexual imagery … by resorting to sublime Romantic diction”, that is, the author’s usage of sexual terms is rather colored by metaphors in avoiding reference to them for what they really imply; and as such, an orgasm is a “sladost” (sweetness) or “blaženstvo” (bliss) and the Enchanter’s penis is a “volšebnyj žezl” (magic wand).

I’ve come to the conclusion that the image of sex in Nabokov’s writings is placed under the context of adultery or desires for someone unreachable, never does he embrace it within the accepted norms of marriage. What is deemed as Nabokov’s first “brutal sex approach” within his works is Bend Sinister, his second English novel and the first to have been published in America. The language of Adam Krug, a philosophic protagonist in the novel, reveals this new manner of sex where it is no longer referred to as something metaphorically ecstatic but a carnal pleasure indeed: “[…] this is going to be a bestial explosion and you might get badly hurt. […] I am nearly three times your age and a great big sad hog of a man. And I don’t love you.”. But it is actually his previous work, the novella The Enchanter that introduces the perverse antecedent of Lolita even more so as it depicts the similar story of a middle aged man with certain affinities for adolescent girls. What I am keen on observing here is that Nabokov seems to have set a pattern in his works prior to Lolita which might have served him the means to eventually create his most controversial piece. And indeed, he recognizes in one of his interviews the “capacity of evolving serial selves” within his stories. The matter of sex is not looked upon in any way different within his American years either because it remains, much as in his Russian times, a controversial topic, never really obtaining the status of what is considered societal acceptance of ethics. As members of the society, we feel obliged to review these ethical standards when confronted with Nabokov’s writings, according to Roy Groen and “it is exactly this lack of a concrete moral framework that makes Lolita an eminent lesson on morality", as he explains in responding to Nabokov’s denial of a “moral in tow” in Lolita.

So we’ve come to accept as a given fact that what raises the question of morality in Lolita is the sex theme which is presented, like in many other works by Vladimir Nabokov, not within the commonly accepted values of individuals but as something distorted and absonant. That which opposes the normal and is emphasized more on this work than on The Enchanter is the pedophilia and the actual perversity of the main character. While in the latter it all starts the same way, with the protagonist marrying the mother to gain access to her daughter, the story shifts more dramatically as we witness the actual death of the protagonist in the end. After the mother of the girl dies, the enchanter takes her on a tour and reveals to the girl his “magic wand” being horrified at his own actions. His death occurs when, running out on the street, he is hit by a car. Critics have not gone as far as to say that Lolita is an extended replica of the novella because certain differences are quite obvious and putting one in the context of sexuality, Lolita, unlike the girl in The Enchanter, acts flirtatiously at times and even responds to Humbert’s needs at the beginning of their relationship (Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo? Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?”).

What, in my opinion, ties Nabokov’s Lolita to morality aren’t the lessons on good and evil and which is which when but more likely the link within us being obliged to deal with them in a different manner. This is the case when reviewing Humbert’s conduct and his pedophilia, because we are asked to look at two different Humberts – the pervert and the artist who manages to induce us a different moral reality using such weapons as his imagination and humor. It is because of this artistic skillfulness of his that we wonder at the true idea of good and evil and whether or not this struggle exists within Lolita mainly because we tend to implicate it as such according to our own set of values. There was a time when morality wasn’t dependent on such a specific code which is today imposed to the individuals by the society in which they live in, but rather each individual lived by sculpting his own set of morals along the course of life and thus created a personal conduit of existence. That time was Antiquity and the individuals I specifically refer to here were the Greek and the Romans who maintained the topic of morality opened to discussions for their own understanding of it by tying it to their “use of pleasures”. In Lolita, Humbert lives in this Hellenistic period where he allows himself to create his own morals when loving the nymphet. In the scene where she becomes his teacher in the matter of what “he has neverˮ sexually experienced as a child, Humbert presents himself to Lolita as innocent as a newbie really is when, in fact, what he had intended was to create another self who, by loving Lolita, would not break the rules on morality. This is also why a number of critics have attempted to look upon Quilty as Humbert’s double, even more so because “you took advantage of my inner essential innocence”, as the latter explains to the first when attempting murder. I believe that by fiercely accusing Quilty, Humbert would actually look upon diverting his own image of perversity towards another evil greater than himself. This is what I mean by saying that Humbert has created his own morals; by his ethical rules, Quilty is much more to blame for everything he has done and deserves the ultimate punishment. I also believe Humbert loses contact with the real world in his story and reveals this new creation after his first intercourse with Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters when he starts “living in a brand new, mad new dream world” in which his way of living is absolutely normal since he is the creator of it. The nymphet is a consequence of his art and thus cannot be submitted to the normal standards of morals since she herself is not “human, but demoniac”. Humbert’s pedophilia is therefore to be accepted within these norms. Since The Enchanters up to Beardsley College, the real world is subsided by Humbert’s desires even more and his imagined version of Lolita as nymphet. It is only after a year of traveling that he realizes the destabilization of Lolita as a normal child and enlists her on the college student’s list in a, what would be later regarded by Humbert, failed attempt to normality.

What we know of love is that it’s not about giving but about being, love is a state of being but in Lolita it goes by physical possession. Humbert understands pedophiles as being “innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior” and his version is sustained by James Kincaid who actualizes that

in place of a dirty old man we have an average age of 35 (Kinsey); only as few as 12% are strangers; in the overwhelming majority of cases, the attentions are not forced on the child; very seldom is sexual intercourse attempted or intended; far from traumatizing the child, these experiences are usually felt to be pleasurable.

Now I am sure neither Humbert’s version, nor Kincaid’s actualization on the matter concords with the point of view most of us must have. The position adopted by the wide range of individuals regarding this matter is rather harsh in blaming the pedophiles and designating them as “sick” in all the horrors of the word. That is why American publishers found it so hard to publish Lolita in the first place and drove the French to ban it after the publication, due to Humbert’s dubious morality. We can now look at what Nabokov denied in Lolita, the “moral in tow”, from a different angle. In truth, his intention may not have been to imply a lesson of life and morals, that is, his scope in writing the book had not necessarily been to portray a level of morality within modern society as to teach it a lesson, but maybe he had intended to provoke the reader in reconstructing what he or she might have deemed as morally valuable until confronted with Lolita.

III.2. Obscurity in Nabokov’s art

“As an artist and a scholar, I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.”

Vladimir Nabokov

When speaking about how a book should be read, Nabokov clearly stated how “curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader”. I have put his statement in the context of rereading Lolita so as to look for Nabokov’s allusions of myth and magic by thoroughly examining his references to other literary works or pieces of art. I believe he was right in his declarations and in the fact that one would have to read a book several times in order to achieve a comprehension of the more subtle allusions because, unlike the case of a painting which is examined by the eye, a book is to be understood by the mind and for the mind to grasp the more obscure elements depicted by the author in a book, several approaches are implied as necessary. The reader is assumed to have been gifted with an artistic sense and a vigilant memory while he would be able to set his imagination free and keep at his side a dictionary. These four elements would lift the veil which the author might have covered the story with and would ease the process of reading because, as Nabokov continued:

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation…A book, no matter what it is – […] – a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

And indeed I can assume that what Nabokov had meant by touching that “sob in the spine of the artist’s reader” was to actually set one’s shoulder to the wheel, assuming “that since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too” in unveiling the paths by which the author had tried to construct an alter reality. I have tried to follow up on Nabokov’s advices in an attempt to look for what is between the lines and the results are exhibited in the following pages. I would like to remind the audience that not all which is obscure in Nabokov’s art has been looked at here, mainly because of the lack of space and also because we bear in mind that certain allusions might have been omitted. In my defense I can say that Nabokov’s works are like a puzzle or a labyrinth that keeps on building itself and one could find it hard to keep up with everything along the way.

Lolita is a game, a chess game or an action game in which “Nabokov plays [games] with our knowledge and ignorance, as Humbert does with Lolita, and with Charlotte, and with us as readers, and as Valeria, Charlotte, Lolita and Clare Quilty do in their turn with Humbert”; it is a game of clues and, once the reader had opened the book, he is to look for the clues “under our noses” if he is ever to win. But these clues are enveloped in some kind of magical dust by the author who sees the role of a writer as storyteller, teacher, and enchanter with the enchanter role to be taken most seriously. How does magic find its way in Nabokov’s Lolita? We should first take a look at the several word references in the text. When Humbert introduces the nymphets he refers to them as “not human, but demoniac” and calls them creatures as if their existence would belong to a different realm and not that of humans. He also attaches them the power to succumb men to their “spell” and, as Bryan Boyd has observed, this is a term of several references in the text. Because to the “bewitched travelers” the nymphets appear as sexually attractive, some connections have been established between the sexual connotations in the novel and the world of fairy tales to which Nabokov often refers to in his novels. In fact, the world of fairy tales has been something closely related to his understanding of the term childhood “which sounds mysterious and new” and “becomes stranger and stranger as it gets mixed up in my small, overstocked, hectic mind with Robin Hood, Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods of old hunch – backed fairies”.

Going back to the terminology in Lolita, I depict several occasions in which Nabokov, through Humbert, introduces the world of fairy tales. It is under Annabel Leigh’s spell that Humbert first gives in to and the only way he manages to break her “spell” is by “incarnating her into another”. He then recognizes Annabel as his “initial fateful elf” whom he “owes” his everlasting lust to and the first time he meets Lolita he sees himself as in the role of “the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess”. Many such allusions are to be found within the text as Humbert tries to create this magical world in which Lolita is transformed into the “sleeping beauty” and himself in “prince charming”. Their extensive travels around America would seem to me like a reference to his feature of an “enchanted traveler” which is held under the spell of the nymphet. By repeatedly saying her name, Humbert leaves me with the impression he is almost chanting it and this is something he introduces since the very start of his confession (“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.”). This goes to show that Lolita is ascribed with magical powers since the beginning of the tale and the real Haze girl had been substituted with this creation by Humbert who initiates his own myth. He is the hero, the damned, and the persecutor in his own story within a story and he lives his existence according to this. If he plays the role of “prince charming” within the first part of his writing, he takes on the role of the avenging within the last part when he sets about murdering Quilty. This is viewed as an attempt from his part to create another fairy tale since the first had been refused by his “frigid princess” and the scene where he actually kills Quilty is “fantastic and fairy-tale like, and comes as the culmination of Humbert’s entrapment within his own imagination”, according to Alfred Appel’s annotation.

Beyond the generic usage of the term “fairy-tale” within Lolita, there lies the actual testimony of the author himself who had admitted to his nymphet being “mythical”. Beyond his denial of the usage of symbolism, there lies the actual proof of its existence within his work. The very word nymphet is a clear allusion to Greek mythology where nymphs are represented by young beautiful maidens who are fond of singing and dancing as deities of nature. These minor divinities that inhabited the cosmos were distinguished by classes and ranks but they were mainly divided into celestial and terrestrial nymphs. The latter were subdivided into the ones of the earth and the ones of water. As we well know by now, Humbert places his first love in a “kingdom by sea” which he attempts to resurrect in Lolita. Attaching the theme of water to the name, Suzanne Fraysse has seen, by splitting it, the plain Lo as in plain water where l’eau is water in French. She explains further how this play on words (Lo – l’eau) affects the reality of the novel:

This pun generates the numerous sea resorts, lakes, pools, toilets in the novel. By a rather simple law of derivation water leads to ice (hence Alaska, the North Pole, icecubes, fridges) and ice to fire (storm, thunders, the fire simultaneously raging in Humbert’s body and in the McCoos’ house, fire escapes, and so on…). As a matter of fact Lolita, a nymph, a water creature, is immediately identified in Humbert’s manuscript as “the fire” of his life. Thus the word “Lolita” with its water, light and fire contains the essential elements with which the creator will construct his universe.

Fraysse has not been the only one to observe the theme of water and its subsidiaries in Lolita. To Maya Medlock the image of water “seems [also] to work as a medium that connects main characters” and what Humbert would seek by bringing about into relief his own sorrow in contrast with Lolita’s sobbing is “to equalize her and himself” because, “by producing his own image as a character shedding profuse tears, Humbert believes he can be closer to his nymphet and then be an ideal lover to her”. There is another way in which water is present within Lolita and it has to do with various paintings which Nabokov has mentioned in his piece. Of all the references he makes to certain painters, one draws my attention the most: it is Botticelli’s Venus that I am concerned with here. The actual painting depicts the naked goddess of love Venus who has been landed onshore on a shell by Zephyrus, the God of Winds and the gentle breeze Aura. The Birth of Venus is one of Botticelli’s most renowned mythological paintings. In his confession, Humbert describes Lolita several times as resembling Venus with “that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes”. Later on, he acknowledges “how much she looked – had always looked – like Botticelli’s russet Venus – the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty”. Thus Humbert is generating his very own Venus the goddess who has ultimate and decisive power over him as she emerges from the troubled depths of his childhood.

The issue of Lolita belonging to the aquatic world, as Christine Raguet explicitly stated, is deemed quite important for it introduces us to the world of mermaids and water nymphs which Nabokov has subtlety referred to in his novel. Humbert bought Lolita a copy of Andersen’s Little Mermaid for her birthday and though the term “mermaid” is used differently by the protagonist and actual author, it still serves to remind us of the fairy-tale like world in which the story is created.

Nabokov once admitted to his passions being “the most intense” known to man: butterflies and writing. When speaking about the first, he claimed his interest to be in the name of science and science alone, never merging one with the other. However, biographers and researchers have found a rather contradictious situation when relating one to the other. Seemingly, the reason why so many of Nabokov’s works are published bearing the emblem of butterflies has to do with

the artists [are] following the same train of thought as is behind the writer’s statement conflating science with poetry, so that the boundaries between art and science are intentionally blurred and, moreover, the roles traditionally assigned to one are passed to the other. Art enriches the connotative field of science and vice versa.

It is important to note that butterflies, in all of the visual texts under consideration, are never solely aesthetic objects. That is, they are never far from the scientific connotations associated with Nabokov’s life.

It is a common well known fact that Nabokov was a fantastic lepidopterist and his engagement within the field has long been praised. He not only collected butterflies but helped improve the system of their cataloging and named quite a few dozen of them. When writing the script for Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita, Nabokov imagined a dialogue between him and Humbert and, within the dialogue he referred to himself as the Butterfly Hunter whom Humbert asked for directions in the matter of insects. His contribution as a lepidopterist has been far less spoken of than his masterpieces of literature. In fact, his input in the field of Lepidoptera had not been widely recognized prior to Lolita’s publication. It was in fact after its appearance that Nabokov’s works on butterflies drew attention of the public. His main biographer Bryan Boyd admitted “it was as though Nabokov was a bigamist, as if he had two wives he loved passionately, literature and Lepidoptera”. If indeed Nabokov had been blessed with a “good eye” that allowed him to bring such an important contribution to the field of Lepidoptera, then he must have been even more gifted with a “third eye” that allowed him to engineer such aesthetically driven pieces of literature. In the article cited above appears another declaration of Robert Michael Pyle’s who is “always amazed that Nabokov was able to balance both his scientific and literary output as he did and achieve such a high standard of productivity in both areas, drawing upon both sides of his mind and his passions”. And as much as Nabokov’s denial of intertwining literature with science, Steven Coates reminds the readers how

butterflies influenced his fiction in countless ways, from the use of lepidopterists as major characters to the sly use of lepidoptery to supply his works with proper names. In “Lolita”, the names of Vanessa van Ness, Percy Elphinstone, Electra Gold and Avis Chapman all recall names of specific butterflies; the name of the town Schmetterling is German for butterfly, and the town of Lepingville hides an insider’s term for butterfly hunting – leping.

There is a fine line between literature and science, I believe. Crossing it does not break any rules of science neither of literature. If anything, it blends the beauty of the latter with the skillfulness of the first. It is what Nabokov has accomplished both separately and taken together. One of the at least two subspecies of butterflies which he discovered is called, to bear testimony for his artistic creation, Nabokov’s wood nymph.

Lolita emerged just like a butterfly in a cocoon to shake the world of its beliefs and to wonder the readers with its beauty. Somewhere, along the approximately 150.000 picturesque miles within America, “at such of our headquarters as Telluride, Colorado, Afton, Wyoming, Portal, Arizona, and Ashland, Oregon, [that] Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days”, Vladimir Nabokov would write in a 1956 essay. These “extensive travels” undertaken by the author with his wife in search of butterflies stood at the very basis of his creative writing and the emergence of the book that would make people question their visions of right and wrong, love or lust, obsession and sorrow. Lolita’s “ugliness” is similar to that of the first impulse of life in a butterfly when its exact beauty is not fully revealed but nestled within a protective layer. Only after the layer has been broken can the real miracle occur. And just as the world needs butterflies not just for their magnificent beauty but for their part in nature and their inspiration for humans, so Lolita has established itself as an instrument of creation. This creation is continuous for it happens with every human being whom it chooses to reveal itself.

Conclusions

If reading Lolita had left me emotionally drained, writing about it has given me an even higher level of emotional exhaustion. Please allow me to make myself clear: in regards to reading as much as writing about the book it has all been a fantastic journey into the other world of Vladimir Nabokov where art perfectly blends with the mystery of being. I’ve experienced myself how Nabokov had not only been able to create this outer reality for himself but mostly did so for his readers and never did he intend for them to be passive spectators; instead, he invited them to co create by leaving the door to his world open and dotted the path with clues to find the way back and forth. This is how I explain the amount of information that sometimes prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees and this is why I’ve stated how tight it has been to invade Nabokov’s Lolita. Normally, one would complain, in regards to conducting a research, about the lack of information and sources but such is not the case here. In fact, had I not formed my perspective and judgments prior to starting the research, I would have most likely found it a bit confusing to deal with so many separate opinions and strong ones indeed, especially when there are cases of reviewers who’ve utterly misunderstood Nabokov. Such a case the author himself presented in his Strong Opinions:

There is a certain type of critic who when reviewing a work of fiction keeps dotting all the i’s with the author’s head. Recently one anonymous clown, writing on Pale Fire in a New York book review, mistook all the declarations of my invented commentator in the book for my own.

Thus the task of forming a solid and authentic study case is more puzzling than what we would normally expect. The work of a genuine reader in regards to Lolita is not truly over with reading Humbert’s last sentence and immortalization but that’s where it actually starts. And the way to go around the wholeness of the book is by fixing it within the right contexts. This is why I’ve chosen to show at the beginning of my paper that the strong facts about Lolita are more available to researchers than any other particular aspects surrounding the context of the book. The fact that it was published under such peculiar circumstances (Olympia Press being known to have published erotic books quite often) had attributed a taboo hint to “l’affaire Lolita”. It didn’t help that American publishers saw it as a threat to morality and life standards either, hence their refusal to publish the book. However, the attempts to asphyxiate Lolita had failed even with the French banning it. By that time, copies were being handed clandestinely from one person to another anyway and young students particularly developed an affinity to smuggle it within America and other parts of Europe alike.

The wheels had been set in motion and the road was laid for Lolita to take over the world. And so it did. The confession of a European intellectual who went by the name of Humbert and who was damned with a passionate hunger for child girls had become available for any avid reader. But that reader would have not witnessed the man’s life time story solely but his most inner thoughts and demons as we’ve seen ourselves by now. A direct consequence of Humbert’s leachy lust, the reader would have also been indirectly involved in the abusive control directed at the twelve years old girl named Lo, Lola, Dolores, Dolly, Lolita, all these names attributing the same being under various metamorphoses. And I was able to indicate in my paper how it was precisely because of the status of bystanders that the readers felt compelled to react against Lolita. I’ve also pointed out how, fascinated by the method in which Humbert had disclosed his monstrosity, critics were unsure on where to place the piece since it raised so many issues and it determined people to question their beliefs. There was of course the matter of style or the “aesthetic bliss” also which Nabokov resorted to in writing all of his novels. This effectively had been enough for the world of literary historiography to give it its most appreciative attention which did happen once the book started to circulate freely and more and more people were exposed to it.

In the second part of my research I was able to demonstrate how Humbert presented himself as the figure of a tortured man having loved at the age of thirteen “a certain initial girl-child” who, upon her dying, was left taunting and tantalizing with the way things might have been. While he self accused his tactics in controlling and possessing Lolita, at the same time I saw Humbert as unable to take full responsibility for his actions, therefore the plea for his cravings having been a direct consequence of the unconsumed love he felt for Annabel Leigh, his childhood sweetheart. To contrast Humbert’s own accusable actions we’ve got Quilty, who is as much fonder of little girls as he is no less of aberrant sex and on the account of having taken advantage of Humbert’s “sinful disadvantage” he is doomed to fatal punishment by the latter. Between the two there stands Lolita, the nymphet, for the real girl Dolores Haze is only dimmable because of Humbert solipsizing her, as I’ve explained.

The most important and relevant section within my paper has proven to be the last chapter in which I’ve made an attempt to see Lolita as separated from the subject of the book itself for the context of blurred symbolism and obscure allusions. I don’t believe Lolita to have holed any moral weight in the eyes of Vladimir Nabokov when he wrote the story. By this, I mean his intention had not been to ring the bell on the clause of the decadence of morality even more so as his own ideas on values were rather sculptured by his day to day life, day to day reality which he perceived as a “very subjective affair”. He could

only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. […] you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.

Had I based my statement solely on this declaration, it would have still proven enough to sustain the idea that Nabokov had not been set on writing Lolita neither as a warning nor to prevail over morality because, as understood from what he himself wrote, his ideas were not set on something but were rather opened to debate just like the question of morals had been a continuous concern for the Hellenistic people. What I’ve observed is that he rather played with terms and general views attached to them in order to keep his readers on a wild goose chase, but if one would have a vigilant mind and a critical and observatory eye, the chase would not turn up so wild after all. This wild goose chase is the effect of Nabokov using so many allusions to tie his works to his life and his works among them all the while denying any such actions or the presence of symbolism within his writings.

This is why I consider Nabovov’s art to be so relevant for literature but since we are mainly concerned with Lolita here, I would like to stress the importance of placing this particular novel within its rightful location. We are in need of acquainting ourselves with many such writings which would serve not just as inspiration for critics but are likely to make us review what we have locked away in some distant corner of our mind and heart. This paper is of relevance within this context because it includes literary elements, analytical research and psychological observations so it is a clear overview of the multiple facets by which Lolita could be approached. Because I’ve had access to a few papers dealing with some particular aspects in Nabokov’s other pieces of work I caught a glimpse of how Lolita could be observed in comparison and this is a topic I feel imperious to expand further in my future research.

References

Books

Berberova, Nina, Nabokov și Lolita sa (trad. Adriana Luciu), București, Editura Humanitas, 2004

Bontilă, Ruxanda, Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels: The Art of Defusing Subjectivism, Editura Didactică și Pedagogică R. A., București, 2004

Bouchet, Marie C., Lolita, a Novel by Vladimir Nabokov, a Film by Stanley Kubrick, Atlande, Paris, 2009

Boyd, Brian, Stalking Nabokov, Colombia University Press, New York, 2011

Ghilimescu, Ștefan, Ion, Lola, Lolita, Bonita, Editura Cartea Românească, București, 2000

Nabokov, Vladimir, Cursuri de literatură (trad. Cristina Rădulescu), Editura Thalia, București, 2004

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita (trad. de Horia Florian Popescu), Editura Polirom, 2011

Tetean, Diana, Simboluri dominante în opera lui Vladimir Nabokov, Editura Atos, București, 2000

De Vries, Gerard, Johnson, Barton D., Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006

Magazines

Convorbiri Literare, Iunie, 1999

Revista Luceafărul, Numărul 10, 2011, București

Articles and Theses in Online Journals and Other Web Sources

Baarsrud, Thorvald, “Sublime Deceit in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita”, Thesis, University of Oslo, 2012, retrieved from https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/123456789/25331, accessed on 04.01.2013

Baruxis, Maria, Christina, “Nabokov and his Lolita: A Chronophobiac’s Struggle to Retain Artistic Omnipotence”, University of California, Santa Barbara, retrieved from http://journals.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/Emergence/article/view/32, accessed on 03.01.2013

Bonney, Duana, “Lolita the Immortal: Nabokov, Kubrick, and Lyne’s Nymphet and Luray’s Pearls: A Woman’s Life, Struggle and Wisdom in North Carolina, 1921-2008”, Thesis, Greensboro, 2009, retrieved http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Bonney_uncg_0154M_10044.pdf, accessed on 05.01.2013

Bouchet, Marie, “The Enchanted Hunters and the Hunted Enchanters: the dizzying effects of embedded structures and meta-artistic devices in Lolita, novel and film”, Sillages critiques, Vol. 11, 2010, retrieved from http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/1737, accessed on 17.12.2012

Bradley, Joel M., “Reviving the teacher: Reading by the light of Nabokov’s reading lamp to find lessons in Lolita”, Thesis, Williams College, Massachusetts, 2006, retrieved from http://library.williams.edu/theses/pdf.php?id=103, accessed on 27.12.2012

Burke, Ken, “Novel to Film, Frame to Window: Lolita as Text and Image, Journal of Visual Literacy, Volume 21, Number 2, 2001, pp. 135-166, retrieved from http://www.ohio.edu/visualliteracy/JVL_ISSUE_ARCHIVES/JVL21(2)/JVL21(2)_pp.135-166.pdf, accessed on 28.12.2012

Cook, Kaye, Elizabeth, “And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality and the Eternal Soul in Vladimir Nabokov”, Thesis, Liberty University, 2012, retrieved from http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=masters, accessed on 14.01.2013

De La Durantaye, Leland, “Kafka’s Reality and Nabokov’s Fantasy: On Dwarves, saints, beetles, symbolism, and genius, Comparative Literature, 59, no. 4, pp. 315-331, retrieved from http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3374612, accessed on 3.01.2013

De La Durantaye, Leland, “Lolita in Lolita, or the Garden, the Gate and the Critics”, Nabokov Studies, Vol. 10, 2006, http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~deladur/101durantaye.pdf, accessed on 15.01.2013

Farina, Will, “Vladimir Nabokov and the Vulgar Aesthetic”, Outstanding Honors Theses, Paper 21, 2010, retrieved from http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/honors_et/21, accessed on 15.01.2013

Fraysse, Suzanne, “Worlds under erasure: Lolita and Postmodernism”, cyc, Volume 12, No. 2, 2008, retrieved from http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1461, accessed on 15.01.2013

Goldman, Eric, “Knowing Lolita: Sexual Deviance and Normality in Nabokov’s Lolita”, Nabokov Studies, Volume 8, 2004, pp. 87-104, retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nab/summary/v008/8.1goldman.html, accessed on 18.01.2013

Gomez, Barreras, Asunción, “Reflexive Narrative in Lolita”, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, Volume 16, 1995, retrieved from http://www.miscelaneajournal.net/images/stories/articulos/vol16/barreras16.pdf, accessed on 17.01.2013

Gomory, Stephanie, “Found in Translation: Revision, Revisitation, and Rewriting in the French Émigré Works of Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera”, Wesleyan University, Connecticut, 2010, retrieved from

http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1412&context=etd_hon_theses, accessed on 09.01.2013

Grishakova, Marina, The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames, Tartu University Press, Tartu, 2012, retrieved from http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=421498, accessed on 12.01.2013

Green, Jennifer Elizabeth, “Aesthetic Excuses and Moral Crimes: The Convergence of Morality and Aesthetics in Nabokov’s Lolita”, English Theses, Paper 9, 2006, retrieved from http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=english_theses, accessed on 29.12.2012

Hetényi, Zsuzsa, “Lolita as Goddess between Life and Death: From Persephone to the Poplars, Mythical Allusions in Nabokov’s Lolita”, Intertexts, Vol. 12, No. 1-2, 2008, retrieved from http://w3.uniroma1.it/LingueLetterature/images/stories/FileSU/RubeoTRYINGtoFORGETtheWAR/lolita_as_goddess.pdf, accessed on 20.01.2013

Hicks, Granville, “’Lolita’ and Her Problems”, The Saturday Review, August 1958, retrieved from http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1958aug16?View=PDF, accessed on 20.12.2012

Hustis, Harriet, “Time will tell: (re)reading the seductive simulacra of Nabokov’s Lolita”, Studies in American Fiction, Volume 35, Number 1, 2007, retrieved from http://iris.lib.neu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=saf_35_1, accessed on 29.12.2012

Jones, Menzies, Heather, “Nabokov’s Dark American Dream: Pedophilia, Poe, and Postmodernism in Lolita”, Thesis, State University of New York, 1995, retrieved from http://chem.chem.rochester.edu/~wdjgrp/H-thesis.pdf, accessed on 10.01.2013

Kinney, Ekings, Alexandra, “The Art of Morality and the Morality of Art: Satire and Parody in Three Novels by Vladimir Nabokov”, Honors Theses – All, Paper 783, 2012, retrieved from http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/783/, accessed on 13.01.2013

Krupski, Maureen P., “Media Voyeurs in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita”, Thesis (B.A.), Florida Atlantic University, Honors College, 2007, retrieved from http://digitool.fcla.edu/R/5JRQLN8C12ATXNIRXPP4P99Q98ETAKGADI2HN1GA27FH7CB2CX-00450, accessed on 05.01.2013

Means, Janine, Rosemary, “Images and Perspectives of the Women in Lolita”, Thesis, Texas Tech University, 1976, retrieved from http://repositories.tdl.org/ttu-ir/bitstream/handle/2346/14205/31295002025020.pdf?sequence=1, accessed on 11.01.2013

Merivale, Patricia, “The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges”, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 294-309, University of Wisconsin Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207107, accessed on 16.01.2013

Meyer, Priscilla, “Nabokov’s Critics: A Review Article”, Modern Philology, 1994, pp. 326-338, http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=div1facpubs, accessed on 17.01.2013

Meyer, Priscilla, “Nabokov and the Spirits: Dolorous Haze – Hazel Shade”, Division 1 Faculty Publications, Paper 115, 2001, http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div1facpubs/115, accessed on 28.12.2012

Meyer, Priscilla, “Lolita and the Genre of the Literary Double: Does Quilty Exist?”, Division III Faculty Publications, Paper 305, retrieved from http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div3facpubs/305, accessed on 13.01.2013

Moudrov, Alexander, “Nabokov’s Invitation to Plato’s Beheading”, Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. I, 2007, http://etc.dal.ca/noj/articles/volume1/MOUDROV_Plato's_Beheading.pdf, accessed on 15.01.2013

Nabokov, Vladimir, “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita” (translation by Earl D. Sampson), retrieved from http://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/maddendw/Lolita%20Preface.pdf, accessed on 17.01.2013

Oberfrank, Adam Jr., “New Worlds of Words: Vladimir Nabokov’s Fairy Tales”, Open Access Dissertations and Theses, Paper 6305, 1985, retrieved from http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7392&context=opendissertations, accessed on 14.01.2013

Quayle, Susan, Anika, “Lolita is Dolores Haze” The Real ‘Child’ and the Real ‘Body’ in Lolita”, Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. III, 2009, retrieved from http://etc.dal.ca/noj/articles/volume3/07_Quayle.pdf, accessed on 20.12.2012

Raguet, Christine, “Lolita, the most ‘mythopoeic’ nymphet”, retrieved from http://www.editions-ellipses.fr/PDF/9782729852863_extrait.pdf, accessed on 18.01.2013

Sheynzon, Elizabeth M., “Transposing Lolita: Virtual Emigration”, Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. I, 2007, http://etc.dal.ca/noj/articles/volume1/SHEYNZON.pdf, accessed on 19.01.2013

Shrayer, Maxim D., “Nabokov’s Sexography”, Russian Literature, XLVIII, pp. 495-516, 2000, retrieved from http://fmwww.bc.edu/SL-V/ShrayerVNSex.pdf, accessed on 28.01.2013

Tompa, Andrea, “Staging Nabokov”, Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. II, 2008, retrieved from http://etc.dal.ca/noj/articles/volume2/09_Tompa.pdf, accessed on 11.01.2013

Tonn, James M., Between Us and Artistic Appreciation: Nabokov and the Problem of Distortion, Dissertation, UMI Publishing Press, 2011, retrieved from http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp01kd17cs869/1/Tonn_princeton_0181D_10058.pdf, accessed on 05.01.2013

Vaingurt, Julia, “Unfair Use: Parody, Plagiarism, And Other Suspicious Practices In and Around Lolita”, Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. V, 2011, retrieved from http://etc.dal.ca/noj/articles/volume5_6/10_Vaingurt_PDFf.pdf , accessed on 13.01.2013

Vargas, Alejandra P., “Unsuspected Romantic Legacies: Modern Re-imagining of Romanticism in Williams, Levertov, & Nabokov”, Dissertation, Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations, Paper 4586, 2009, retrieved from http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07092009-001536/, accessed on 03.01.2013

Walsh, Jacqueline, “The Ethical Content of Lolita”, The Ohio State University, 2007, retrieved from http://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/28456/Thesis.pdf?sequence=1, accessed on 03.01.2013

Wasmuth, John, “Unreliable Narration in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita”, Lund University, 2009, retrieved from

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1415031&fileOId=1471697, accessed on 03.01.2013

Young, Marie, Micaela, “Lolita Last Star: A Theoretically Informed Narrative of Survivance”, Thesis, Montana State University, Montana, 2010, retrieved from http://etd.lib.montana.edu/etd/2010/young/YoungM0510.pdf, accessed on 28.12.2012

Annex 1

Picture retrieved from http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/abvn.htm, made available by Michael Juliar

Annex 2

Picture retrieved from http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/abvn.htm, made available by Michael Juliar

References

Books

Berberova, Nina, Nabokov și Lolita sa (trad. Adriana Luciu), București, Editura Humanitas, 2004

Bontilă, Ruxanda, Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels: The Art of Defusing Subjectivism, Editura Didactică și Pedagogică R. A., București, 2004

Bouchet, Marie C., Lolita, a Novel by Vladimir Nabokov, a Film by Stanley Kubrick, Atlande, Paris, 2009

Boyd, Brian, Stalking Nabokov, Colombia University Press, New York, 2011

Ghilimescu, Ștefan, Ion, Lola, Lolita, Bonita, Editura Cartea Românească, București, 2000

Nabokov, Vladimir, Cursuri de literatură (trad. Cristina Rădulescu), Editura Thalia, București, 2004

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita (trad. de Horia Florian Popescu), Editura Polirom, 2011

Tetean, Diana, Simboluri dominante în opera lui Vladimir Nabokov, Editura Atos, București, 2000

De Vries, Gerard, Johnson, Barton D., Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006

Magazines

Convorbiri Literare, Iunie, 1999

Revista Luceafărul, Numărul 10, 2011, București

Articles and Theses in Online Journals and Other Web Sources

Baarsrud, Thorvald, “Sublime Deceit in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita”, Thesis, University of Oslo, 2012, retrieved from https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/123456789/25331, accessed on 04.01.2013

Baruxis, Maria, Christina, “Nabokov and his Lolita: A Chronophobiac’s Struggle to Retain Artistic Omnipotence”, University of California, Santa Barbara, retrieved from http://journals.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/Emergence/article/view/32, accessed on 03.01.2013

Bonney, Duana, “Lolita the Immortal: Nabokov, Kubrick, and Lyne’s Nymphet and Luray’s Pearls: A Woman’s Life, Struggle and Wisdom in North Carolina, 1921-2008”, Thesis, Greensboro, 2009, retrieved http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Bonney_uncg_0154M_10044.pdf, accessed on 05.01.2013

Bouchet, Marie, “The Enchanted Hunters and the Hunted Enchanters: the dizzying effects of embedded structures and meta-artistic devices in Lolita, novel and film”, Sillages critiques, Vol. 11, 2010, retrieved from http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/1737, accessed on 17.12.2012

Bradley, Joel M., “Reviving the teacher: Reading by the light of Nabokov’s reading lamp to find lessons in Lolita”, Thesis, Williams College, Massachusetts, 2006, retrieved from http://library.williams.edu/theses/pdf.php?id=103, accessed on 27.12.2012

Burke, Ken, “Novel to Film, Frame to Window: Lolita as Text and Image, Journal of Visual Literacy, Volume 21, Number 2, 2001, pp. 135-166, retrieved from http://www.ohio.edu/visualliteracy/JVL_ISSUE_ARCHIVES/JVL21(2)/JVL21(2)_pp.135-166.pdf, accessed on 28.12.2012

Cook, Kaye, Elizabeth, “And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality and the Eternal Soul in Vladimir Nabokov”, Thesis, Liberty University, 2012, retrieved from http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=masters, accessed on 14.01.2013

De La Durantaye, Leland, “Kafka’s Reality and Nabokov’s Fantasy: On Dwarves, saints, beetles, symbolism, and genius, Comparative Literature, 59, no. 4, pp. 315-331, retrieved from http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3374612, accessed on 3.01.2013

De La Durantaye, Leland, “Lolita in Lolita, or the Garden, the Gate and the Critics”, Nabokov Studies, Vol. 10, 2006, http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~deladur/101durantaye.pdf, accessed on 15.01.2013

Farina, Will, “Vladimir Nabokov and the Vulgar Aesthetic”, Outstanding Honors Theses, Paper 21, 2010, retrieved from http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/honors_et/21, accessed on 15.01.2013

Fraysse, Suzanne, “Worlds under erasure: Lolita and Postmodernism”, cyc, Volume 12, No. 2, 2008, retrieved from http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1461, accessed on 15.01.2013

Goldman, Eric, “Knowing Lolita: Sexual Deviance and Normality in Nabokov’s Lolita”, Nabokov Studies, Volume 8, 2004, pp. 87-104, retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nab/summary/v008/8.1goldman.html, accessed on 18.01.2013

=== prezentare ===

My presentation of Lolita

I would like to start my presentation by saying that my own views on Lolita have changed from the moment I first saw Adrian Lyne's adaptation of the novel up to the last point of finishing my research and paper. Maybe in anticipating autumn or perhaps it was because of the pressure in the atmosphere the night when I first saw the movie that I let myself involve so much more in the story than I had done with any other movies I deemed just as good as Lyne's. I admit that reading Lolita after I had seen the film did not make things easier, in fact, my objectivity was already blurred by the sympathy I felt for Humbert. I knew I had to forget everything I had seen in the movie and read the book as though I had never met Lolita before. And so I did. The reading provoked me even more and I knew I couldn't stop there. Lolita is just the kind of book that makes you want to know more about it. That was when I decided to embark on this journey towards Vladimir Nabokov's works and his novel. While I know my work has just begun and, years from now, I may look on this paper and have my opinions all mixed up about it, it will still stand as the testimony of the appreciation that I have for Nabokov.

I divided my paper into three chapters which are both interrelated and separated from one another. Allow me to explain what I mean by this. It especially has to do with certain sub chapters and mostly with the link between the second and the third chapter. I wanted to include some dates and facts around Lolita being published because that's part of the effect that the book has had in the 1950's. I also wanted to analyze the relationship between Humbert and Lolita as part of an imaginative reading because I wanted to put it in the context of separately observing their personalities in the second chapter. And what I sought by trying to find some similarities in Humbert and Nabokov was to discover just how much of the latter's denial about personal involvement within Lolita is actually true. I should point that Nabokov had constantly stated how his opinions differed largely from Humbert's own views and that he has used no personal experiences to project them on his character. In relation to Humbert being Nabokov's reflection, I have included the chapter that concerns the morality in Lolita and the obscurity as well.

Therefore, I shall start my presentation by introducing the circumstances around Lolita's publishing "issue" and I will move along with offering a general view of the story to expand the subject comprised within it. I will dedicate some few minutes to Humbert and Lolita and I will come to the end of my presentation by incorporating the most relevant aspects on the morality and the obscurity, finally drawing my own conclusions.

Of how Lolita entered my life I've already spoken of. What I haven't said yet is the reason for my interest in knowing more about the whereabouts of its existence. In an interview, Nabokov was asked about his sources of inspiration in writing Lolita. His answer had puzzled me because I could just not relate it to his writing at that time. He said he had felt "the first little throb of inspiration" when, reading a newspaper, he came across an article about an ape that had drawn the bars of the cages where it was kept. Now, how could have that inspire Nabokov to write the story of a man in love with a twelve years old girl? I was only at the beginning of my inquiries back then and little did I know that Nabokov's masterpiece would prove itself even more intriguing than that. But if you are asking yourselves the same question, I'm sure that, by following my lead, you will have the answer by the time I close my presentation.

It is important to notice the reason Lolita was refused by the American publishers and banned by France and that it has to do with the subject of the book itself. The fear of disclosing such a frail relationship that existed between Humbert and Lolita prevailed over the literary and artistic compound of Nabokov's style. Although the official Lolita only reached the States in 1958, copies were smuggled into the country before the official publication date and parts of the book had even been published in different magazines by that time. Many people became more and more curious about this entire affair and wanted to know exactly what was so outrageous about the book. I believe the reactions it got were defined by one's sense of morality as much as another’s capabilities to read between the lines. The matter of controversy was present because the world was not ready, in the 1950's, to accept stories of love and sexual relationships between an adult and a child so easily. The idea was even more preposterous when they considered Humbert's means of abusing Lolita and his predilection for nymphets, distinctive child girls who possessed sex appeal, not normally an attribute of most female children. This story, catalogued as obscene by some, is not exactly what I would call a normal love story and even naming it a love story at all is inconclusive because Lolita had never actually been in love with Humbert and Humbert himself seems more inclined at times to just physically posses Lolita. This is the reason I've chosen to name the second part of my paper's first chapter "Not your typical love story".

What we are witnessing when reading Nabokov's novel is the confession of a man who puts his odd sexual desires on the account of having loved at the age of thirteen a girl by the name of Annabel Leigh. Annabel died before Humbert and she had the chance to consummate their love, thus Humbert explains his desires as a direct result of what he had never been gratified with, as a teenage child. Lolita enters his life under disdainful circumstances, Humbert being obliged to accept her mother’s lodging and becomes infatuated with the little girl right away. He marries Charlotte to keep close to Lolita and takes the role of carer after her mother dies. Humbert keeps Lolita under his control until the girl finally makes her escape with Quilty, a rather bizarre character in the novel. He is occasionally present throughout the story as one would mostly have to guess his appearances. Humbert’s confession ends with revealing his own act of murder and a last recollection of Lolita.

The reason most readers feel unable to regard Humbert as a pedophile is related to his memento technique. He seeks to repeatedly involve the readers amidst his turmoil by addressing them directly with “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” and other allocutions alike. But when setting Humbert’s pleading voice aside, it becomes clear that his actions are blamable. He is a hypocrite in falsely marrying Charlotte, he lies to Jean and John about being the paternal father of Lolita only because he is afraid someone might take her away from him, he drugs Lolita with the intention to rape her and he eventually murders Quilty. Therefore, if these actions would have not been portrayed in such a passionate way, we might have not given it a second thought in accusing Humbert, just like the immediate reaction I got when reading the story of the molested woman, which is presented in the third chapter, was of disgust and revolt. And my reaction was precisely because of the molester’s use of language which sounds so violent, just as his actions are. That is why Humbert creates himself another world and makes Lolita the object of his imagination, to legalize his actions and sexual manipulations. By creating his own world, Humbert knows he only responds to himself and whatever he does is excusable because of the love he has for Lolita. While he appears tortured by his own desires and makes the readers constantly aware of that, he presents himself as unable to resist his lust and eventually it is his cravings that prevail over his love for the nymphet. In the end, that’s all he sees in Lolita, the figure of a nymphet and not a regular child, curious of life and emotionally vulnerable. H.H hardly pays any attention to Lolita’s suffering although he is quite aware of her sobbing and his vision of Lolita makes it difficult even for us to recognize the real girl behind the nymphet. Consequently, we must not take Humbert’s word for granted when he speaks of Lolita but we must remember our duty as active readers to seek the truth beyond the obvious. Only then, can we get to know Lolita for who she really is, to understand her needs and perspectives of life, her own desires and opinions. Humbert’s personal views of Lolita seem inconsistent at times, once regarding her as a seducer, other times as a terrorized child.

What I’ve expanded in my paper regarding Lolita is both her idealized image constructed by Humbert and my opinion of who she really presents herself to be: your average rebel, misunderstood by her mother and who looks for love and acceptance in all the wrong places. Lolita is just as fond of material things as most of the girls in the real world of the 1950’s were. The marked sought financial benefits from manufacturing as many dedicated items to the teenage consumerist as possible and made them available to middle class children. As a result, an economic boom was registered with so many of them affording to buy on a regular basis things like clothes, jewelry, fast food and other items especially designed for them. Lolita, as Humbert mentions quite a few times in his story, is as conventional as that and often looks to profit from his obsession by requesting material favors in exchange for his sexual pleasures. However, I do not look on her behavior as promiscuous mostly because I believe her actions are determined by the way of life Humbert had imposed on them. I would think she rather saw no other way to deal with Humbert’s possessiveness and decided to at least gather a few moments of happiness, be it material. She does see a way out from Humbert’s entrapment when she meets Quilty and it is actually him for whom Lolita falls.

In introducing a few similarities that tie Humbert and Nabokov together, I would like to bring to your attention that Nabokov was suspected at one time to have had the same sexual affinities as his character, a presupposition based solely on the ground of Nabokov having loved at the age of ten a girl whose name was Claude. Nabokov remained fond of his childhood memories much as Humbert himself and wrote a short story dedicated to the girl, which he named “Colette”. As there are no actual proofs to sustain such a statement, I will move on by saying that the writer of the confession and the author of the book do seem to resemble somehow. They are both intellectuals coming from Europe, they seem to share tastes in music and American culture and have proven their difficulty in accommodating to this environment. We know Humbert traveled much around the States with Lolita by his side and that Nabokov never actually owned a house in America but was rather happy to live in rented houses and motels, just like Humbert himself chose places like the former to live in.

This brings me to the last part of my paper and the final stage of my presentation. What people have wondered one too many times about Lolita is in regards to the right and wrong in the story. The matter has to do with a rather psychological and sociological approach than a literary one and is to be observed by understanding Humbert’s pedophilia and the idea of the imposed moral values in a society. We can relate the controversial reactions on Lolita by tying them to people’s own set of values and ideas of morals. It is important to understand that people react different when they confront themselves with stories which may bring about personal memories and stir all sorts of emotions, hence my reason for presenting a specific case on page 41. If we look into Nabokov’s other writings as well, we will find that sex is present in most of them and it is hardly presented as a normal act between a husband and wife or among two people who love each other. In Nabokov’s novels, sexual desires are either acts of pedophilia (The Enchanter, Lolita) or carnal pleasures in one’s attempt to compensate the loss of a loved one (ex., Adam Krug in Bend Sinister). Nabokov would thus determine us to reevaluate the standards by which we live and reconsider our rights and wrongs. This is why, like most of his other works Lolita is not a black and white story but has to be looked at several times before even attempting to catalog it for anything.

I can now understand Nabokov’s creation of Lolita as a “beautiful puzzle”. If I eventually found out that he explored Lolita’s captivity based on that ape’s drawing, I also came to know what he meant by the former declaration. Lots of clues are dotted along the script of the novel to help the reader in his investigation of Lolita. What constructs the puzzle is Humbert’s story which appears as something certain, but one a second reading one finds the leads to another version of the book, where magic and myth form an alliance. Humbert’s imaginary world is his own fairy tale where he acts as Prince Charming and Lolita is his Sleeping Beauty who refuses the everlasting and escapes his world. In Lolita, nothing is what it seems and the reader has been left by Nabokov with the task to discover and rediscover its many worlds by making an effort to find the missing pieces of the puzzle first and finally to arrange them. Nabokov wanted his readers to be as active as an original author is when he writes beautiful compositions. He believed readers needed to engage more in the process of reading and not merely satisfy themselves with an overview of a book.

In my paper, all of the elements and the aspects are part of this puzzle named Lolita and are meant to bring the novel to the attention of the public. Since the book was published in 1955, respectively 1958, it would seem natural to already have its place within the Romanian academic field. However, when comparing the amount of criticism ranging from West with the attention it has been given by the Romanian critics, the percentages are highly low on our part. Furthermore, only few of Nabokov’s works have been translated and are accessible to readers. That is something we have to look upon since Vladimir Nabokov’s writings are the object of analytical observations and both psychological and sociological approach, not to mention the literary merit it deserves. This paper represents merely the initiation of a larger research I plan to carry further and expand.

Thank you!