Skip to content

Lolita

Lolita

DramaErotica
Pages
321
Published
1955
Language
English

Synopsis

Humbert Humbert, a cultured European academic newly arrived in America, narrates his own story from a prison cell. He rents a room in a New England town and becomes fixated on his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze, whom he privately calls Lolita. To stay near her, he marries her mother, and when circumstances leave him her sole guardian, he takes the girl on a long, restless drive across the United States.

Told entirely in Humbert's ornate, self-justifying voice, the novel is a masterpiece of unreliable narration: seductive, allusive, and grotesque at once. Nabokov gives his predator dazzling language precisely so the reader must work to see past it to the child being harmed and the life being destroyed.

First published in 1955 and long controversial, Lolita is widely regarded as one of the great and most difficult novels of the twentieth century, a dark study of obsession, delusion, and the abuse of power, and a demonstration of how beautiful prose can be used to conceal monstrous acts.

Prose complexity
10/10

Vibe

DarkReflective
Unreliable Narrator

Genres

Drama Erotica Classics Literary Fiction Romance

About the author

V
Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков; 23 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899c – 2 July 1977) was a multilingual Russian-American novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made contributions to entomology and had an interest in chess problems. Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as among his most important novels and is his most widely kn...

Characters

Humbert HumbertProtagonist

A cultured predator narrating his own crimes in ornate, self-justifying prose.

Dolores "Lolita" HazeProtagonist

The twelve-year-old girl Humbert fixates on and abuses.

Charlotte HazeSupporting

Dolores's mother, whom Humbert marries to remain in the household.

All characters in Lolita

Frequently asked questions

  • Is the story based on a true crime?

    The novel was partially inspired by the 1948 kidnapping of eleven-year-old Sally Horner by a man named Frank La Salle, a case that received significant media attention at the time. While the author famously downplayed external influences on his work, the narrator makes a direct, albeit brief, reference to this real-life crime within the text.

  • Are there film adaptations of the book?

    The novel has been adapted into two major feature films, the first directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and the second by Adrian Lyne in 1997. The 1962 version is notable for featuring a screenplay written by the author himself, though it was heavily modified to comply with the censorship standards of the era.

  • Why was the book originally published in France?

    The author sought publication in Paris because he feared that the subject matter would lead to immediate censorship or legal suppression in the United States and Britain. It was eventually released by a press that primarily handled controversial or avant-garde literature before it was later published in the United States.

Read all 16 reviews