Today in 1958, America met Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov’s most sensational novel was first published in New York by G.P. Putnam’s Sons on this date, almost three years after the book was originally published in Paris. It became an instant bestseller.
But there’s a lot more to Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) than Lolita.
Born into wealth in tsarist St. Petersburg, Nabokov fled Russia with his family in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. He published nine novels in Russian before switching to English in the nineteen-forties. While his life was remarkable, and his other books like Pale Fire are considered classics, Nabokov’s name is synonymous with Lolita, the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged pedophile who has sex with his 12-year old stepdaughter. Scandal erupted when Lolita was first published in 1955—and banned not in America, but France. Although some found the book repugnant, amoral, or pornographic, others saw humor in Lolita, reading it as a parody of American culture, melodramatic romance stories and Freudian analysis. Today Lolita is just as edgy and unsettling as it was in 1955. How much do you know about, as The Police once sang, “that book by Nabokov”? Both Time and Modern Library rank it as one of the “100 Best.”
Try a few quick questions excerpted from Don’t Know Much About Literature
1. In what language was Lolita originally written?
2. What is Lolita’s real name?
3. What was Nabokov’s other profession?
Answers
1. English, even though it was first published in France because no American publisher would initially touch it.
2. Dolores Haze.
3. Nabokov also taught entymology at Harvard and discovered several new species of butterfly, including “Nabokov’s wood nymph.”
