Lolita is a novel of the Russian writer naturalized American Vladimir Nabokov, published for the first time in 1955 in France.

This novel is known as well for its stylistics qualities as for its discussed subject. The main character, Humbert Humbert , is indeed openly paedophile, and the novel is centered on its relation, in particular sexual, with a girl prépubère, Dolores Haze.

Origin of the novel

Nabokov imagined the history of a connection between a man of ripe age and a préadolescente before even its departure for the United States. Initially, the history was to proceed in Provence.

As of its exit, the novel caused a scandal. However Lolita never failed not to leave. Nabokov tried to burn the unfinished manuscript a few years tired not to see the end of this novel before. The manuscript was refused by all the American editors, who either feared legal proceedings or morals, or wished to modify the book in a direction " moral". Nabokov made it publish for the first time by Olympia Close in original version, in Paris, in 1955. In spite of a prestigious catalog (Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett…), the publisher founded by Maurice Girodias the son of Jack Kahane which in particular published Ulysses of James Joyce at Obelisk Close, is specialized in the edition of sulfurous works, which Nabokov is unaware of in 1955. It qualifies later the titles published by this publisher of " new obscenes for which Mr Girodias engaged minute-books so that they made them with his assistance".

Nabokov knew that it was going to shock. According to him, puritan America of the time comprises three taboos. In addition to the Pedophilia and the Inceste approached in Lolita , there is the " marriage resounding and glorious négro-white, producing a foultitude of children and grandchildren; and an atheist hardened with the happy and useful life, dying in its sleep at the age of 106 ans."

As of its exit in France the novel was censured. The censure is raised a time, between 1958 and the arrival of De Gaulle to the capacity. But meanwhile Gallimard published a translation in French. Consequently, the censure of the english language version is only anecdotic. The book leaves into 1958 to the United States, at Putnam and is a great success, remaining during 180 days with the head of the best sales of the country. Lolita is even the first novel, after the best-seller Gone With The Wind of Margaret Mitchell, to reach the threshold of the 100  000 specimens sold in three weeks. Since, Lolita was sold with more than 50 million specimens in the world.

History

The book is presented in the form of a long confession of the main character, written before his lawsuit. Humbert Humbert having however died before her judgment, the book is published by a doctor - as “a clinical document” being able to be useful in the psychiatric medium.

Humbert Humbert, professor of literature, leave Europe to settle in the United States, where he seeks a room to rent. It is by visiting a room at Charlotte Haze that he sees sublimates it girl of his landlady, which pushes it to remain. After having met it, it quickly begins with espionner the young person Dolores Haze, 12 years old (she is called Lo or Lolita). His/her mother, a solitary widow then becomes a means for Humbert to approach the child. The mother and Humbert marry at the end of some time. However, Charlotte Haze discovers little time after the diary of her husband where this one spreads out its attraction for the young girl and her indifference for his wife. Shocked by this discovery, she flees of the house and dies a few minutes later, reversed by a car. Lolita not being there at the time when the drama proceeds, it is unaware of all dead of his/her mother. Humbert benefits from the situation to come to seek the young girl in the holiday camp when it had been sent.

It then begins a voyage through the United States in company of Lolita with which it maintains the sexual relationships. At the end of this Lolita voyage and move in to him in a medium-sized city and Lolita takes again a normal schooling. After this interlude, Humbert and Lolita undertake a new voyage. During this last Lolita manages to flee to join a competitor paedophile of Humbert, Clare Quilty.

At the end of the novel, Humbert briefly finds Lolita which requires money of him to settle with a man and to remake his life in Alaska (where she dies in layer). Humbert carries out at this time that it always wishes it, even if it is not more a “nymphette”.

Explored topics

Humbert Humbert tests for Lolita a passion without terminals. It at the same time in love and is obsessed sexually by the American young person. Idle intellectual and shareholder, it does not have any social constraint and is inserted gradually in an increasingly ambiguous relation. On its Lolita side is attracted by this man who symbolizes in his eyes a phantasm of male ideal, and plays with Humbert without suspecting that it opens the door with a relation which it does not control and who will be completed in a nightmare for it. Humbert also destroys himself to live this history, but one does not test compassion for a supposed adult to control the play. opinion less on the defensive adds here that the compassion for the fate of Humbert the humberlificotor is precisely one of the interests of the book, difficult to perceive for those which feel with the edge of immorality

Lolita explores other sets of themes that the relation between the two characters. One thus discovers there the shift between Europe and the United States of the Fifties. Humbert being the prototype of a refined European, while the entourage of Lolita (and Lolita itself) being the example even of average Americans, the ironic and shifted eye of Humbert describes us thus the difference between the two cultures. Lolita is also a Avatar female myth of Lilith (whose pronunciation, described by Nabokov, is the same one: L redoubled, T final), as a figure of the woman whom one cannot marry and of the illicit loves. Nabokov had already explored this topic in a poem published about thirty years before, entitled Lilith and whose heroin is a young girl who stops the coitus: there still, it is about one of the aspects of the figure of Lilith, as woman who diverts the sexuality of procreation.

The plays intertextuels abound in the novel, so that this last constitutes also a reflection on the Culture (literary and pictorial).

In Lolita, one also finds some attacks of Nabokov so that it calls the " openly; charlatanism freudien" , Humbert turning in derision all the psychoanalysts whom it crosses.

All in all, if Humbert did not have a monstrous sexual life, he would be a very tempting, sensitive, funny and refined character. That joined of many situations put in scene by Nabokov: a brilliant character surrounded by poor, mediocrities being represented here by the insipid Charlotte Haze, declining Quilty, the stupid Gaston, the weak Valerie and to a certain extent Lolita itself: although it is ready with all to have it, surface universe and nauseating of the young girl the inconvenient one.

Humbert resembles thus John Shade, Sebastian Knight, Van Veen and others. Each one of these characters is besides never of an immaculate genius, and if Humbert is sullied with a monstrous defect, the other heroes of Nabokov have all of the abominable tares which waste their common virtues: the sensitivity, humor, the culture, the creativity, passion, qualities which one suspects in Nabokov itself.

Lolita with the cinema

The novel was the subject of two film adaptations:

The version of Kubrick employed Nabokov as consultant, but the author was however disappointed result which it found distant from his novel. The principal difference lies in the place given to the character of Clare Quilty:

  • Nabokov in its novel makes of Quilty a character in filigree, suggested, ever described, never clearly identified, until its final appearance (to say some more the intrigue would reveal).
  • Kubrick in its film makes of Quilty a character of foreground, named with many recoveries, and truly ahead of of the scene. Not only the final appearance of Quilty is moved at the beginning of film of Kubrick, but the character himself is placed in the very first plan, right in front of the camera, while Humbert is relegated to the bottom of the decoration or in plans of cut.

This approach of Kubrick would be due to the fact that Quilty was played by Peter Sellers, its actor fetish whom it will re-use in three of the principal roles in his following film Doctor Folamour , and whom it would have naturally emphasized compared to James Mason, which interpreted Humbert.

The appreciation of film is a stone of obstacle between fans of Kubrick and Nabokov.

The second version will try to approach more of the novel, in particular by replaçant Quilty in the second plan, while making more explicit the sexual relationship (the taboos moved back in the Nineties compared to the Sixties) and by evoking the pre-Lolita past of Humbert (who had been occulted by Kubrick but which occupies a big part of the novel of Nabokov).

Lolita in the music

A song was insipirée of this book: Me… Lolita it is sung by the singer Alizee and was the tube of the summer 2000.

Note on the French translation

The first French translation of Lolita was carried out by E.H. Kahane. The novel was republished in French in 2001 with a new translation of Maurice Couturier and a foreword explaining this: the first translation would differ considerably from the original text, making it illegible per moments, and would have been repudiated by Nabokov itself.

Usually speaking French, Nabokov indeed expressed its desire to work over again the translation of Lolita , but forever have time to devote itself to it.

The two versions have their forces and their weaknesses. The second gains in fidelity but not inevitably of legibility nor in poetry, the first having, for some, all the attributes of an adaptation more than of a true translation. ( Lolita does not escape its destiny from beautiful infidel).

Passage in the vocabulary

Lolita became since a common noun evoking a perverse and tempting teenager, or a girl who goes towards sexuality at a too young age.

See too

Sources

  • Zanganeh, Lila Azam, “magic spells of Lolita”, in Le Monde , August 21st, 2006.

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