Lolita

Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and another film by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful, Broadway musical. Many authors consider it the greatest work of the 20th century.

About Lolita in brief

Summary Lolita Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and another film by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful, Broadway musical. Many authors consider it the greatest work of the 20th century, and it has been included in several lists of best books, such as Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels, Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century, Bokklubben World Library, Modern Library’s 100 Best novels, and The Big Read. The term Lolita has been assimilated into popular culture as a description of a young girl who is “precociously seductive… without connotations of victimization” The novel is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books, who states that he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym \”Humbert Humbert\”, who had recently died of heart disease while awaiting a murder trial in jail. The memoir begins with HumberT’s birth in Paris in 1910. He spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh. After graduation, he works as an English teacher and begins editing an academic literary textbook. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small town in New England, to continue working on his book. In his search for a new home, he meets the widow Charlotte Haze, who is accepting tenants.

She leads him to her garden, where her 12-year-old daughter Dolores is sunbathing. He sees in Dolores the perfect nymphet, the embodiment of his old love Annabel, and quickly decides to move in. He becomes sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as “nymphets” The impassioned Humber t constantly searches for discreet forms of fulfilling his sexual urges, usually via the smallest physical contact with Dolores. He then takes Dolores to a high-end hotel, and consciously rapes her so that he will feel guilty if he has taken a sedative by saying it is a vitamin. There, he discovers that Dolores had been fobbed with a milder drug and frequently wakes up, drifting in and out of sleep. When he returns to the hotel, he waits for Dolores, who seems to be aware of his plan for her, to be out of bed. He marries Charlotte for instrumental reasons, and so marries Dolores as her stepfather. He later destroys the letters that Charlotte wrote to her friends warning them of him. Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is killed by a swerving car and destroys them. The book was originally written in English and first published in Paris by Olympia Press. Later it was translated into Russian and published in New York City in 1967.