Reading Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (Literature Insights)

That the precocious youngster read these works in English, Russian, and French proved invaluable for his future: By the time Nabokov arrived in America, he had every reason to be personally and artistically exhausted. Nabokov stayed on in England to continue his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where, while pursuing a B.

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At Cambridge he wrote his first story, filled notebooks with verse, translated the poetry of Rupert Brooke into Russian, discovered the work of James Joyce, played soccer and tennis, and engaged in a number of romances. Taking up residence in Berlin, a major center for expatriate Russians, Nabokov launched the career of V.

Sirin—a nom de plume he had adopted in to distinguish himself from his father, V. Petersburg and already an admirer of Sirin's work. They were married on 15 April Invitation to a Beheading Priglashenie na kazn ', ; trans. For Nabokov, Carroll's Alice embodied all the qualities of wonder and imagination that the English Romantics celebrated in the child. In one sense, each of Nabokov's novels traces the way in which a central character constructs, out of myriad surrounding phenomena, the world he or she perceives as real.

Nabokov's first novel, Mary Mashen'ka , ; trans. As Ganin, a young Russian exile, dreams of reuniting with a former sweetheart, her image becomes the focus of intense yearning for his lost homeland. After Mary was published, Nabokov was reportedly dissatisfied with its lack of aesthetic detachment. In his second novel, King, Queen, Knave Korol', dama, valet , , he achieved that detachment by calling attention to the fictional status of his universe—a construct of words taking life from the pen of the author.

An arsenal of literary techniques—including wordplay, allusions, self-conscious references, and authorial intrusions—interrupts the reader's sympathetic participation in the characters' lives and world. Franz, the myopic in both senses young knave of the novel, arrives in Berlin to work for his wealthy uncle, a prominent businessman named Dreyer. Martha, Dreyer's discontented wife, promptly seduces him, embroiling Franz in a scheme to murder her husband and get his money. The author's overt manipulations notwithstanding, each of the protagonists demonstrates the extent to which character—the psychology and moral consciousness of each character—is fate.

Unable to resist Martha's despotic will, the cowardly Franz becomes not only her accomplice but also her puppet. She, on the other hand, is energized by her hatred for her husband, whose elusive inner life is a source of mysterious energy she cannot control and whose unpredictable actions inevitably thwart her plans. In The Defense Zashchita Luzhina , ; trans. Grand master Luzhin is a man rescued from the daunting confusion of life, its relentless sallies against his reclusive nature, by the elegant order of chess.

The cold strategies of the chessboard have virtually eclipsed Luzhin's awareness of the world around him. The safety of his retreat is undermined, however, by an extraordinary woman who enters his life. When she and Luzhin's doctor convince him that he must, for the sake of his health and sanity, give up chess altogether, Luzhin tries, but fails, to ward off the deadly encroachments of the game.

He ultimately seeks escape by leaping from a window. Sustaining dual, if not multiple, perspectives, it places unique demands on the reader. From this vantage, the apparently three-dimensional world recedes into the artist's two-dimensional canvas, itself a kind of game board on which the reader and writer face off. The Eye Sogliadatai , ; trans. In the end, Smurov turns out to be the narrator's projected self, or alter ego. Employing all the devices of a verbal illusionist, Nabokov constructs a hall of mirrors through which the delusional narrator leads his readers.

At the end of , when The Eye was first published, Nabokov was already putting the finishing touches on his next novel, Glory Podvig , ; trans. By , fascist ideologues were taking to the streets of Berlin, and the offices of Rul' were attacked. Despite the threatening nature of these events, Nabokov continued to write at an astonishing rate, his imagination focused on the past rather than the present.

The exile's longing to return to the land of his childhood constitutes Glory' s nostalgic theme. Martin Edelweiss, a romantic young Russian, dreams of returning to his beloved homeland, now in the grip of Soviet rule. Near the novel's end, as Martin entertains the possibility of his own death at the hands of executioners, he invokes the brave figure of the Russian Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev, who was executed as a counterrevolutionary by the Bolsheviks in At one point in the novel, for example, Martin conjures an imaginary land called Zoorland, now bent under the weight of totalitarian rule—an image that would recur in many of Nabokov's later stories and novels, including Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister , and would receive its apotheosis in the remarkable design of Pale Fire.

In contrast to Glory , the last of Nabokov's novels to be translated into English, Laughter in the Dark Kamera obskura , received its first English translation as Camera Obscura in Dissatisfied with the translator's version, Nabokov retranslated it several years later as Laughter in the Dark Despite its flaws, the novel offers insight into some of the most important and least understood aspects of his fiction. The narrator's opening statement introduces the novel's detached perspective: He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

Psychologically blind from the story's outset, Albinus Kretschmar is, by the time he tries to murder his mistress, physically blind as well. The car crash that destroys his sight is brought on by his jealous rage at Margot's infidelity. His attempt at revenge similarly backfires: These chilling ironies are greatly relished by the central villain of the tale, a sadistic artist named Axel Rex, who happens to be Margot's lover and delights in toying with the unwitting Albinus. A professional cartoonist, Rex proceeds to turn the rituals of daily life into clever vignettes evincing the same blend of cruelty and credulity that he creates in his newspaper sketches.

His attempt to turn life into art for his own amusement represents a particularly vicious form of the misperception that befalls many a Nabokov character—from kindly Luzhin in The Defense to perverse Hermann in Despair and, most eloquently, to tormented Humbert in Lolita. Each fails to recognize the distinction between life and art and the laws governing the individual's prerogatives with respect to both. Nabokov, by contrast, was rigorous about the distinction between life and art. To Nabokov, the artist's control over his fictional universe obviates his characters' autonomy—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on which democracy is founded.

Because his highly wrought works of artifice underscore rather than hide this fact, he is often accused of the kind of aesthetic arrogance evinced by Axel Rex.

The best argument against such a view is made by the novel itself. In one telling scene from Laughter in the Dark , Rex is engaging in his favorite pastime, taunting the blind Albinus, when Albinus's brother-in-law Paul arrives in search of his missing relative. Bursting into the room to find the naked Rex seated next to the blind man, tickling his face with a stem of grass, Paul delivers a blow to Rex's head, instantly reducing Albinus's tormentor to the naked wretch that he is.

The protagonist of Nabokov's sixth Russian novel, Despair Otchaianie , ; trans. Hermann Karlovich, the first-person narrator, serves as a parody of the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky 's confessional narrators. Savaging Hermann's artistic pretensions, Nabokov subverts the assumptions of detective thrillers as he critiques Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment for its elevation of murder to the status of a philosophical paradigm.

From Martha's thwarted attempt to murder her husband in King, Queen, Knave to Humbert's failure to redeem his crime against Lolita by murdering his rival, Clare Quilty, Nabokov's fiction demonstrates that the act of murder is never inspired, merely vicious and intrinsically banal. The protagonist, Cincinnatus C. Gradually, Cincinnatus comes to see that the fortress in which he is imprisoned is only a stage set; the functionaries who run it, interchangeable dummies.

The primary role of consciousness in Nabokov's world and vision here receives its most radical expression. As the sole prisoner in this macabre farce, Cincinnatus alone can grant it power. In the end, Cincinnatus holds on to his head in both senses. Whether Cincinnatus finds liberation in death or in a world existing beyond the flimsy trappings of the prison is a question left for readers to ponder.

Depending on one's critical approach—political, metafictional, or metaphysical—Cincinnatus can be perceived as imprisoned in a fictionalized totalitarian regime, the author's plot, or the inferior world of matter. In each case, Nabokov's use of theatrical metaphors—the fortress's freshly painted walls, greasepainted characters, hastily improvised props—suggests the individual's entrapment in a sham world.

If the fraudulent political trials staged by Stalin and his henchmen during the s had some bearing on Nabokov's use of theatrical devices in Invitation , so did his own early activity as a playwright. The Waltz Invention Izobretenie val'sa , ; trans.

Just as Cincinnatus's jailer, lawyer, and warden—Rodion, Roman, and Rodrig—turn out to be interchangeable dummies, so the government officials in Waltz —Grab, Grob, Gerb, Grib, and others—are similarly devoid of individual identity. Evincing characteristics of both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, Waltz anticipates the dropping of the atomic bomb seven years after its publication. The complete text of the novel did not appear in book form until , however, when it was brought out in Russian by a publisher based in New York.

For non-Russian readers there is much to appreciate as well. Interweaving themes and motifs from Nabokov's own personal history—Fyodor's loss of a cherished parent as well as of his native land and language— The Gift also depicts the profound literary and emotional rapport that develops between Fyodor and Zina, the young woman he meets and intends to marry. As he reviews the pattern of events that has led to his discovery of Zina, Fyodor gleans the operation of some benign force or fate at work in his life: From another, it bespeaks Fyodor's apprehension of a realm existing beyond the world accessible to mortal sense.

Half a century later he would translate a small fraction of his Russian verse into English, publishing it alongside the fourteen poems he wrote in English in Poems and Problems Another aspect of Nabokov's personal history reflected in The Gift is Fyodor's abiding admiration for Aleksandr Pushkin — , acknowledged by most Russians as the nation's greatest poet. The genius of Pushkin presides over The Gift as it does over Nabokov's monumental four-volume translation of and commentary to Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin Evgenii Onegin , ; trans.

Nabokov's insistence on providing a literal translation of Pushkin's narrative poem, whose nuances he addresses in a thousand pages of scholarly commentary, sparked his public debate with the American critic Edmund Wilson. Their argument over the principles of translation and of Russian usage became so bitter that it ultimately ended the friendship.

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Launching his linguistic metamorphosis by translating two of his Russian novels into English Despair in , Laughter in the Dark in , Nabokov began work in Paris, during the winter of , on his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Its narrator, identified only as V. In his debut performance as an English writer, Nabokov sought to bring his own style and vision to life in another language.

He was, moreover, about to do something still more extraordinary: During the winter and spring of , while still engaged in the arduous process of obtaining visas for his family to flee Europe, Nabokov prepared for anticipated employment in America by writing a series of lectures on Russian literature. Forty years later they were edited and published as Lectures on Russian Literature , a companion volume to his Lectures on Literature , devised for his classes on world literature at Wellesley and Cornell. During his first five years in the United States, Nabokov worked on translations of Russian writers, conducted intensive research on Lepidoptera at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and completed a commissioned study, Nikolai Gogol , on one of his favorite Russian writers.

In , a year after Nabokov became a U. The metaphor aptly suggests the exposure to outside forces that the main characters of these novels suffer, imprisoned as they are in absurd but brutal regimes bent on the destruction of the individual. His younger brother Sergey, who died in a German concentration camp, was less fortunate. In Bend Sinister , the totalitarian regime's hostility to individual identity and freedom is exercised by the Party of the Average Man, under the direction of a dictator named Paduk, in an invented country whose inhabitants speak a motley language comprised of Slavic and Germanic roots.

Having recently suffered the death of his beloved wife, Olga, Adam Krug mourns her throughout—only to have his agony redoubled when the regime kidnaps his eight-year-old son, David, in an attempt to force Krug, a celebrated philosopher, to comply with the regime's ideological aims. Although the setting and theme of Bend Sinister appear to look back at Nabokov's Russian and European past rather than toward his American present, references to the life and landscape of the United States are scattered throughout the text. This density of cross-cultural and multilingual allusions has become a hallmark of Nabokov's American fiction.

The fact that the manuscript has two titles indicates that multiple stories will be told. Vladimir Nabokov relies on linguistic patterns of doubled characters and words to suggest the overlap of opposites. Without fail, Ray accounts for the fates of most of the characters, while Nabokov continues to play games in order to keep readers on their toes.

Ray admits that the Lolita character is real, however, he does not yet disclose the details of her fate. He does, though, outline the fall of Mrs. Richard Schiller, a plot twist that will only become obvious towards the end of the novel.

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Nabokov invites readers to research newspaper articles in order to investigate factual events, however, cautions that those archives will not offer the entire story. Throughout the course of the book, many of the characters mentioned claim to have ulterior motives, or to be honest, this is thought to be to trick the readers and manipulate other characters. The truth is likely less interesting than the way in which is it retold. Ray creates a vantage point separate from Nabokov and Humbert. He is symbolic of the first reader of the manuscript, and similar to him, additional readers might have contradictory views.

Despite being clearly disgusted by the heinous crimes committed by Humbert, Ray expresses admiration from his literary capabilities and his honest love for the young subject. And, despite several of the characters having psychological ties, psychological explanations quickly prove to be inadequate.

Lolita: Literature Guides - A Research Guide for Students

Humbert is the main character and narrator of Lolita. Humbert is European, smart, and has an obsession for children whom he refers to as nymphets. He has a long history of mental illness. Somehow Humbert manages to seduce the audience with the way he speaks, he is, however, capable of rape and murder. The story of Lolita is penned from his prison cell, where he awaits trial.

Humbert passes away from heart failure. Dolores Haze aka Lolita: She is a pre-teen girl, seductive, flirtatious and unpredictable. Initially she is attracted to Humbert, attempting to compete with her mother for his affection. However, as she grows and begins to develop an interest in spending time with children her own age, Humbert becomes more and more demanding.

Humbert endeavors to educate the girl, but she remains interested in American pop culture and has no interest in learning his cultured ways. Soon she runs away with Clare Quilty, but he leaves her after she refuses to participate in child pornography. Lolita eventually marries a man named Dick Schiller and passes away in childbirth. Clare is said to the just as evil as Humbert. He is a successful playwright and a child pornographer who develops an interest in Lolita early on.

He follows her and eventually kidnaps her from Humbert. Even though Lolita did love him, he eventually abandoned her. Nabokov does not disclose the importance of Quilty until the end of the story.

Nabokov, Vladimir

Charlotte is the mother of Lolita and deceased wife of Humbert. She was a middle-class woman who had strong aspirations of a life of sophistication. Charlotte never manages to achieve her goals. Her relationship with her daughter has been in turmoil for a very long time. Charlotte worships Humbert and turns a blind eye to his pedophilic ways until she finds his journal.

Annabel is said to be the original love of Humbert. Humbert deeply loved Annabel right up until the time she dies from typhus. Humbert pines for her until he meets Lolita. Valeria is the first wife of Humbert.

He married her in an attempt to cure himself of his addiction to young girls. However, Humbert regards Valeria as being intellectually inferior to himself and bullies her. When he tells her of his plans to move to America, she leaves him and marries a Russian taxi cab driver. Both Valeria and her husband later die. He is a caring, good hearted man. Dick plans to move with Lolita to Alaska. After losing Lolita, Humbert moves in with Rita. Humbert likes Rita, but finds her to be dumb.

The Power of Language: Nabokov had a strong love for language, it was his belief that proper language could enhance anything the same level as fine art. In his novel, Lolita, the use of language overpowers the shocking subject matter and perhaps even gives it a beautiful quality that it is not deserving of.

Lolita is ripe with reprehensible content, such as rape, murder, incest and pedophilia.



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Nabokov is trying to serve two masters, with the usual results. I suspect Nabokov paid too high a price for his extreme subject matter. Lolita is, in this sense, a failure, even if the most brilliant of failures. This review was a superlative dissection of the compelling, yet deeply flawed, logic behind the philosophy of Lolita.

And yet, the characterization of Humbert Humbert is so that the reader is masochistically thrilled by the eloquently-phrased depravity he displays; with his labyrinthyne half-truths and deft evasion of judgement, it is nearly impossible to not be lured into sympathy. Have you ever considered writing on Quora or Medium? There are substantial communities of literati who would certainly be benefited by your writing.

Thank you very much! I have considered Medium, maybe for freestanding non-book-review essays, and will probably give it a try this summer when I have more time. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Thanks for your superb review! I learn something new every time I read one.

John Pistelli 1 April Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email required Address never made public. Information This entry was posted on 19 November by John Pistelli in book reviews , literary criticism , literature , politics and tagged american literature , fiction , modernism , novels , postmodern fiction , postmodernism , postwar literature , russian literature , twentieth century fiction , twentieth-century literature , vladimir nabokov. Categories Categories Select Category art biography book reviews comics creative writing drama essays fiction film literary criticism literature memoir music philosophy plays poetry politics psychoanalysis religion science sociology of literature the ecstasy of michaela Uncategorized work writers writing year in books.