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Lolita - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 13 Mar 2008 ... Lolita (1955) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into ... Plot summary - Style and interpretation - Publication and reception en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita - Cached - Similar Lolita (1962 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 11 May 2009 ... Lolita is a 1962 influential comedy-drama film by Stanley Kubrick based on the classic novel of the same title by Vladimir Nabokov. ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita_(1962_film) Cached - Similar Show more results from en.wikipedia.org Lolita (1997) Directed by Adrian Lyne. With Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, Frank Langella. A man marries his landlady so he can take advantage of her daughter. www.imdb.com/title/tt0119558/ - Cached - Simi-

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the theet. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet in one sock. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.â&#x20AC;? Vladimir Nabokov RE: design is dead Fosca Salvi <f.salvi@interactiondesign-lab.com> A:100x100x100@yahoo.com

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Lolita (1962) Directed by Stanley Kubrick. With James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon. A middle-aged college professor becomes infatuated with a 14-year-old nymphet. www.imdb.com/title/tt0056193/ - Cached - Similar Show more results from www.imdb.com Video results for lolita Alizee - Moi Lolita 4 min 45 sec www.youtube.com Lolita (1997) * Part 1 3 min 8 sec www.youtube.com L O L I T A blog - Lolitas blogg modeblogg Lolita blog about ... Lolita/ Lolitas blogg modeblogg Lolita blog about fashion photography graphic design interior art lifestyle inspiration blog ... www.lolitas.se/ - Cached - Similar Amazon.com: Lolita (9780679723165): Vladimir Nabokov: Books by Vladimir Nabokov (Author) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. ... Buy Lolita and get Lolita at an additional 5% off Amazon.comâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s everyday low ... www.amazon.com/Lolita-Vladimir-Nabokov/.../0679723161 - Cached - Similar

Amazon.com: The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated ... Amazon.com: The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (9780679727293): Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Appel Jr.: Books. www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised.../ dp/0679727299 - Similar Show more results from www.amazon.com Lolita (Penguin Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Craig Raine, Vladimir ... Because Nabokov treats his subject so skilfully, `Lolita’ was a fantastic book. ... ‘Lolita’ is probably the most risque novel ever written. ... www.amazon.co.uk/Lolita-Penguin-Classics.../0141182539 - Cached - Similar Lolita Bar NYC Show map of 266 Broome St, New York, NY 10002, USA www.lolitabar.net/ - Cached - Similar Lolita (1962) Lolita (1962) was Stanley Kubrick’s sixth film - a brilliant, sly adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated yet controversially-infamous 1955 novel of a ... www.filmsite.org/loli.html - Cached - Similar Michael Symon: Lola and Lolita Tremont bistro offers menu, wine list, events, and a biography of the chef/owner. www.lolabistro.com/ - Cached - Similar

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Lolita From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lolita (1955) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1958 in New York. The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the narrator and protagonist, middle aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze. After its publication, Nabokov’s Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name “Lolita” has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious young girl. The novel was adapted to film in 1962 and again in 1997. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is fourth on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.

Plot summary Lolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as “nymphets”. This obsession with young girls is suggested by Humbert himself to have been a result of his failure to consummate an affair with a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, before her premature death from typhus. Shortly before the start of World War II, Humbert leaves Paris for New York when his first relationship with a grown woman turns sour. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. When the first house he was promised burns down, he ends up at the door of Charlotte Haze, a widow, with something of a crush on Humbert, whom she sees as a European sophisticate. As the two tour the house, Humbert rehearses different ways of turning her offer down, but after being led out into the garden he notices Haze’s 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (who is also variously referred to in the novel as Dolores, Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L) in the garden. Humbert, perhaps seeing Annabel in her, is instantly smitten and eagerly agrees to rent the room afterwards. When Lolita is sent to summer camp, Mrs. Haze gives Humbert an ultimatum by letter that he must marry her (for she has fallen in love with him) or move out. He is horrified at first, but sees

living with Lolita as his stepdaughter as a way to make her part of his living fantasy and so agrees. Charlotte marries Humbert and appears oblivious to Humbertâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distaste for her and his lust for Lolita until she reads his diary against his permission. Horrified and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee with her daughter, writing letters to Humbert, Lolita, and a reformatory boarding school for young ladies to which she apparently intends to send her daughter. Charlotte confronts Humbert when he returns home, ignoring his protests that the diary entries are just notes for a novel, and bolts from the house to post the letters. But upon crossing the street, she is struck and killed by a passing motorist. A child retrieves the letters and gives them to Humbert, who destroys them. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, telling her and the mistress of the camp that her mother is desperately ill in a hospital. He then takes her to The Enchanted Hunters, a nearby hotel, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert attempts to use sleeping pills on Lolita so that he may molest her without her knowledge, but they have little effect on her. Instead, she consciously seduces Humbert the next morning. At breakfast he discovers that he is not her first lover, as she has had a sexual affair with a boy at summer camp. After leaving the hotel, Humbert tells the

“trouble-making” Lolita that her mother is dead. Alone and frightened, Lolita has no choice but to accept her stepfather into her life on his terms. Driving Lolita around the country in Charlotte’s car, moving from state to state and motel to motel, Humbert bribes the girl for sexual favors. He subsequently fosters a kind of love for her, but is conscious that she does not reciprocate this and shares none of his interests. Likewise, he is also unaware of her mentality as a human being. Eventually, after a year’s tour of North America, the two settle down in another New England town, Beardsley, with Humbert posing as Lolita’s father and Lolita enrolled in a private girls’ school. The headmistress views Humbert’s possessive supervision as that of a strict, old-world European parent as he continues to deny her the chance to learn acting. Humbert nevertheless is persuaded to allow Lolita to take part in the school’s theatrical club, although he extracts additional sexual favors from her in exchange for his permission; however, even this becomes increasingly more difficult. Ominously, the title of the play — The Hunted Enchanters — is an inversion of the name of the hotel where he had his first sexual encounter with her. Lolita is enthusiastic about the play and is said to have impressed the playwright, who attended a

rehearsal. Just before opening night Lolita and Humbert have a ferocious argument, and Lolita bolts from the house on a bicycle. Found nearby by Humbert a few minutes later, Lolita declares that she wants to immediately leave town and resume their travels as they had used to. Humbert is delighted, but becomes increasingly guarded as they again drive westward, nagged by a feeling that they are being followed by a convertible, and that Lolita knows who the man is. He is right. Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte’s, the nephew of the local dentist in Ramsdale, and the author of the play being performed at Lolita’s school, is himself a pedophile and amateur pornographer. He is tailing the couple in accordance with a secret plan of escape he has devised with Lolita. Lolita tries to escape from Humbert at more than one point on the trip, but always fails to elude Humbert. While Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid, Lolita becomes severely ill and recuperates in a nearby hospital. Humbert is forced to cut short his vigil over Lolita by night because of the hospital’s rigid operating hours. One night, she checks out with her “uncle”, who has paid the hospital bill. Humbert, still clueless about the identity of Lolita’s “abductor,” makes farcical and frantic attempts to find them by inspecting various motel-register aliases, which have been laced by

Quilty with insults and jokes flavored with literary allusions, some of them supplied by Lolita herself. Eventually, Humbert gives up his search for Lolita, a broken, dejected man. During this period, Humbert has a chaotic, twoyear love-affair with an alcoholic named Rita who, at 30, is 10 years younger than he and a passable physical substitute for Lolita. By 1952, Humbert has settled down as a scholar at a small academic institute. One day, he receives a letter with no return address from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, heavily pregnant, and in desperate need of funds until her husband is able to start his job in Alaska. Armed with a loaded gun, Humbert discovers his young obsession’s residence after asking for directions. After finding Lolita, Humbert gives her the money she needs as well as her rightful stake in her mother’s estate. During their conversation, Lolita explains that her husband, a nearly-deaf and crippled war-veteran, was not her abductor, whereupon Humbert offers to give her all the money he has if she will reveal the man’s identity. Lolita complies, saying that she had really loved Clare Quilty, but that he threw her out after she refused to perform in a pornographic film he was making. Humbert asks her to leave her husband and follow him, but she refuses, breaking Humbert’s spirit.

Leaving Lolita forever, Humbert attempts to surprise and kill Quilty at his mansion in an act of revenge. Quilty is in a daze as Humbert’s gun is pointed at him, and Humbert does not shoot immediately as he wants his victim to understand who Humbert is and why he is there, seeking to get Quilty to admit his part in the abduction of Lolita. Humbert appears to reject Lolita’s earlier admission that she loved Quilty and her failure to say that she loved Humbert. After a long standoff and a subsequent struggle for Humbert’s gun, Quilty, who is now mentally unsound, responds unusually as Humbert repeatedly shoots him while chasing him around his own house. He finally dies with a comical lack of interest, expressing his slight concern in an affected English accent. The eventual killing of Quilty fails to offer Humbert a sense of satisfaction and he ends up leaving Quilty’s mansion for his final journey in Charlotte’s old car. Seeking a sense of release from his present condition Humbert decides to drive on the wrong side of the road, a minor act of defiance following the murder he has committed, but one that offers him satisfaction. Arrested for murder, he writes a book he entitles Lolita or, The Confessions of a White Widowed Male, while awaiting trial. The narrative closes with Humbert’s final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well and states he hopes her child will be a boy. According to the novel’s fictional “Foreword”,

Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript, which had been days before his trial was to begin. Lolita dies giving birth to a stillborn baby on Christmas Day, 1952. Style and interpretation The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with wordplay and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel’s flamboyant style is characterized by word play, double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used “faunlet”. Nabokov’s Lolita is not an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert’s obsession with the young girl. Several times, Humbert begs the reader to understand that he is not proud of his union with Lolita, but is filled with remorse. At one point, he is listening to the sounds of children playing outdoors, and is stricken with guilt at the realization that he robbed Lolita of her childhood. Some critics have accepted Humbert’s version of events at face value. In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that

the theme of Lolita is “not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child”. Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov’s powers as an ironist. For Richard Rorty, in his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a “monster of incuriosity”. Nabokov himself described Humbert as “a vain and cruel wretch” and “a hateful person” (quoted in Levine, 1967). Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, Koba the Dread, proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov’s childhood (though Nabokov states in his Afterword that he “[detests] symbols and allegories”). Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. “Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies”, he says. “Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny”. In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about a covert women’s reading group. For Nafisi, the essence of the novel is Humbert’s solipsism and his erasure of Lolita’s independent identity. She

writes: “Lolita was given to us as Humbert’s creature [...] To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own [...] Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses”. One of the novel’s early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so selfdeceived a narrator: “we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [...] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting”. Publication and reception Due to its subject matter, Nabokov was unable to find an American publisher for Lolita after finishing it in 1953. After four refusals, he finally resorted to Olympia Press in Paris, September 1955. Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, there were no substantial reviews. Eventually, at the end of 1955, Graham Greene, in an interview with the (London) Times, called it one of the best novels of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the (London) Sunday

Express, whose editor called it “the filthiest book I have ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.” British Customs officers were then instructed by a panicked Home Office to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom. In December 1956 the French followed suit and the Minister of the Interior banned Lolita (the ban lasted for two years). Its eventual British publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson caused a scandal which contributed to the end of the political career of one of the publishers, Nigel Nicolson. By complete contrast, American officials were initially nervous, but the first American edition was issued without problems by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958, and was a bestseller, the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication. Today, it is considered by many to be one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest English language novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. Nabokov rated the book highly himself. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962 he said, “Lolita is a special favourite of mine. It was my most difficult book — the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make

it real.” Two years later, in 1964’s interview for Playboy, he said: “I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle —its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works —at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” At the same year, in the interview for Life, Nabokov was asked, “Which of your writings has pleased you most?” He answered: “I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow —perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don’t seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.” Links in Nabokov’s work In 1939, Nabokov wrote a novella Volshebnik (Волшебник) that was published only posthumously in 1986 in English translation as The Enchanter. It can be seen as an early version of Lo-

lita but with significant differences: it takes place in Central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide. The theme of ephebophilia was already touched on by Nabokov in his short story A Nursery Tale, written in 1926. Also, in the 1932 Laughter in the Dark, Margot Peters is 16 and already had an affair when middle-aged Albinus is attracted to her. In chapter three of the novel The Gift (written in Russian in 1935–1937) the similar gist of Lolita’s first chapter is outlined to the protagonist Fyodor Cherdyntsev by his obnoxious landlord Shchyogolev as an idea of a novel he would write “if I only had the time”: a man marries a widow only to gain access to her young daughter, who however resists all his passes. Shchyogolev says it happened “in reality” to a friend of his; it is made clear to the reader that it concerns himself and his stepdaughter Zina (fifteen at the time of marriage) who becomes the love of Fyodor’s life and his child bride. In April 1947 Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: “I am writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls – and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea...” The work expanded into Lolita during the next eight years. Nabokov used the title A Kingdom by the Sea in his 1974 pseudo-

autobiographic novel Look at the Harlequins! for a Lolita-like book written by the narrator who, in addition, travels with his teenage daughter Bel from motel to motel after the death of her mother; later, his fourth wife is Belâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s look-alike and shares her birthday.