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By Root 4019 0

Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

November 12, 1956

* The “prototype” of Lolita my father refers to was published posthumously in 1986 as The Enchanter; all of his novels, and much of the rest of his work, are now available in both English and Russian.

—Dmitri Nabokov

Born into a multilingual, cultured family in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov would become one of the greatest masters of English and Russian letters. Nabokov’s aristocratic childhood was spent reading great literature in French, English, and Russian, including Poe, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. His father was an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism and was one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. Following the Bolshevik revolution, the family went into exile, and the elder Nabokov was killed at a political rally in Berlin by right-wing assassins. During his family’s exile, Nabokov attended Trinity College, Cambridge University where he studied Slavic and romance languages.

Over two decades in Berlin and Paris, Nabokov emerged as a prominent émigré writer, with a prolific outpouring that included 10 novels in Russian, as well as short stories, plays, and poems. Writing under the pseudonym “Vladimir Sirin,” he also supported himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and composing crossword puzzles in Russian. With his wife, Véra, and one son, Dmitiri, Nabokov moved to the United States in 1940. He taught Russian, creative writing, and literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard Universities while achieving universal renown as an English prose stylist, poet, critic, and translator. His first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941. While in America, Nabokov penned arguably some of his greatest works—Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)—and also translated his earlier Russian novels into English. After the monumental success of Lolita, Nabokov moved with his family to Montreux, Switzerland in 1961, where he resided until his death in 1977. His final novel, The Original of Laura, was published posthumously in 2009.

Published in 1955, Lolita became an instant sensation, establishing Vladimir Nabokov’s reputation as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century. It is an unforgettable and immaculate masterpiece on obsession.

Humbert Humbert, erstwhile college professor, aesthete and tortured romantic is a self-professed ‘nympholept.’ Lolita is the impossibly funny and rapturously beautiful story of Humbert’s total, catastrophic obsession with twelve-year-old Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze. At once prim and predatory, Humbert will stop at nothing in his frenzy to possess his ‘nymphet’, first marrying her mother and then embarking with Lolita on a journey across the American landscape, through roadside diners and five-dollar-a-night motels.

Brimming with gloriously flamboyant word play, Lolita displays the unparalleled prose style of a master of the English language in a story that also emerges as a transcendent satire on American consumerism.

Shockingly tender and beautiful, Lolita is suffused with an incandescent