Reading Order
Lolita Reading Order
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov is a novel narrated by Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European intellectual who is obsessed with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze — whom he calls Lolita — and who becomes her stepfather and abuser after marrying her mother. The novel is structured as Humbert's confession, written in prison while awaiting trial for a murder, and it is one of the most formally perfect and morally difficult texts in the English literary canon: a book in which the narrator's prose is so beautiful, so seductive, so exquisitely designed to aestheticize and justify his crimes, that the reader's own complicity in that aestheticization is itself one of the novel's subjects. Nabokov, who wrote the novel first in Russian and then translated and expanded it into English, hid in plain sight a vast network of allusions, puns, and parodies that reward scholarly attention — but the novel is also, for those who read with sufficient moral attention, a devastating portrait of a child's destruction and a ruthless critique of a certain kind of intellectual who uses beauty as a cover for evil.
Where to start
Lolita (1955)
Complete Lolita Book List
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov·1955
Lolita — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Lolita a love story?
Lolita is emphatically not a love story, though Humbert Humbert presents it as one. Humbert is a pedophile and a rapist who abuses a twelve-year-old girl for years, moves across the United States with her while she is entirely dependent on him, and uses his literary gifts to aestheticize his crimes in a way designed to make the reader a complicit observer of Dolores Haze's destruction. Nabokov — who was unequivocal in interviews that Humbert is a monster and Lolita is his victim — built the novel so that the more carefully a reader attends to the text, the more clearly they see what Humbert is concealing: a girl who cries herself to sleep every night, who has nowhere else to go, who is being systematically destroyed. The novel's formal perfection is itself a moral challenge: it asks the reader to notice when they are being seduced by Humbert's prose and to refuse that seduction.
Who is Dolores Haze, and what happens to her?
Dolores Haze — Lo, Lolita — is a twelve-year-old girl from New England whose widowed mother marries Humbert Humbert. Her mother dies in an accident, leaving Dolores entirely dependent on Humbert, who takes her across the country for two years, raping her nightly. She eventually escapes with Clare Quilty (a playwright she has met), who abandons her after she refuses to make pornographic films. She ends up married to a young man named Richard Schiller in Alaska, becomes pregnant, and dies in childbirth at seventeen. Humbert finds her shortly before his own arrest and she tells him she never wants to see him again. The novel's concealed subject — the one that Humbert's beautiful prose constantly suppresses and displaces — is the systematic destruction of a girl who deserved a different life entirely.
How should a reader approach Nabokov's prose style in Lolita?
Nabokov's prose in Lolita is generally considered the most beautiful in twentieth-century English fiction. The sentences are dense with allusion, wordplay, and metaphor; the rhythm is extraordinary; the imagery is precise and surprising. But the prose is also Humbert's — it is the voice of a man using every resource of language to make his crimes invisible, to aestheticize a child's suffering into something that resembles beauty. The reader's job is to be alert to this: to notice when a word or image is doing rhetorical work, when Humbert's self-justifications are structurally visible, when the prose is concealing rather than revealing. Nabokov himself recommended reading the novel with a dictionary; he also recommended noticing when Lolita's perspective breaks through Humbert's narration — the moments when she is briefly herself rather than Humbert's fantasy of her.
Is Lolita autobiographical?
No — Nabokov, who was by all accounts deeply devoted to his wife Véra and had no attraction to children, emphasized in every public discussion of the novel that Humbert is not a self-portrait. The novel emerged from a short story called 'The Enchanter' (1939, published posthumously) that explored similar material; Nabokov has described the seed of the novel as 'the first throb of Lolita' in a newspaper story about an ape in a Paris zoo who was taught to draw and produced a picture of the bars of his cage. The caged animal drawing the bars of its own cage is a figure for the way Lolita's own captivity is visible through Humbert's narration, if the reader knows how to look.
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