Lolita
Related: pedophilia - Lolita (film) - Olympia (publisher) - Vladimir Nabokov - Stanley Kubrick
The front wrapper of vol. 1 of the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, published in August 1955. The novel was suppressed in July 1958, four months before The Olympia Press reprinted it for the first time as part of its Traveller's Companion series. --http://www.sonic.net/~patk/1957.html [Oct 2005]
Image sourced here.
Contemporary cover of Lolita
Lolita (1955) - Vladimir Nabokov [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Description
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Lolita (1955) - Vladimir Nabokov[Amazon.com]
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject. The novel's narrator and main character, Humbert Humbert, becomes sexually obsessed with a prepubescent girl.
Lolita is also the title of two motion pictures based on the novel: in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick (where Nabokov was involved in the writing), and in 1997 by Adrian Lyne. The name has also become a slang term for a sexually attractive or precocious young girl. For more about these non-literary meanings of the term, see the end of this article.
Publication and reception
Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press, a publisher of "erotica" in Paris, which published Lolita in 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual U.S. publication on August 18, 1958, by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Publication_and_reception [Oct 2005]
The Circulation of Sado-Masochistic Desire in the Lolita Texts
In Vladimir Nabokov's novel of 1955, the character named Lolita is the prize in a deadly struggle between two men. When Lolita was made into a film in 1961, a text that bore the name of a woman became a feminized commodity over which flesh-and-blood men struggled to gain possession. As in any such conflict when men compete for the same female object, there is an erotic tension tinged with sado-masochism. This tension pervades all of the Lolita texts, including Nabokov's novel, Stanley Kubrick's film, and the screenplay by Nabokov that Kubrick largely ignored when he made the film. A similar tension pervaded the dramas played out during the making the film and persisted at least until 1974 when Nabokov revised and published his original screenplay. In some ways, however, Nabokov's belated attempt to regain control of his text was a masochistic return to a scene in which his vision of the film would again remain unrealized. -- Krin Gabbard
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