Reading Order
Lolita Reading Order
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is a standalone novel in which Humbert Humbert, a European academic, writes his confession of obsessive infatuation with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita. Published first in Paris and then, after considerable controversy, in the United States, it is one of the most formally brilliant and morally complex novels in the English language.
Where to start
Lolita
Complete Lolita Book List
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov·1955·Humbert's confession — complete and standalone. Kubrick's 1962 film is excellent; Adrian Lyne's 1997 version more faithful to the text. - Buy
Pale Fire
OptionalVladimir Nabokov·1962·A poem by the fictional John Shade, annotated by the delusional Charles Kinbote — Nabokov's most formally experimental novel, as dazzling in different ways as Lolita. - Buy
Invitation to a Beheading
OptionalVladimir Nabokov·1938·Cincinnatus C. awaits execution for a crime called "gnostical turpitude" — Nabokov's Kafkaesque political novel, written in Russian before Lolita. - Buy
Speak, Memory
OptionalVladimir Nabokov·1951·Nabokov's autobiography of his Russian childhood and European exile — essential for understanding the emotional landscape behind Lolita and all his English-language fiction.
Lolita — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Lolita a defense of pedophilia?
No — and this is the most important thing to understand about the novel. Lolita is narrated entirely by Humbert Humbert, a pedophile and abuser who is also an extraordinarily eloquent liar. The novel's central formal achievement is that Nabokov builds into the text, beneath Humbert's gorgeous prose, all the evidence the reader needs to understand what Humbert is actually doing to Dolores Haze and why his account of their "relationship" is a complete distortion of what actually happened. Nabokov said that reading Lolita properly meant being "aware all the time of Humbert's rhetoric and its manipulations." The actual Lolita — Dolores Haze — is a child who has been kidnapped and repeatedly raped by her stepfather, and who dies in childbirth at seventeen. The novel does not endorse this; it makes it visible through the very excess of Humbert's self-justification.
Why is Lolita considered a masterpiece if the subject is so disturbing?
The novel is considered a masterpiece precisely because of the tension between its surface (Humbert's ravishing prose, his self-portrayal as a romantic victim) and its reality (the systematic destruction of a child). Nabokov's technical achievement is to make this tension palpable throughout: readers who are seduced by Humbert's voice and then horrified by what they have been enjoying are having the experience the novel is designed to produce. The prose style is not decoration; it is the mechanism through which the novel makes its argument about how beauty and eloquence can be used to conceal and excuse moral horror. Lolita is also a great novel about America (Nabokov arrived as an immigrant in 1940) and about the relationship between European and American culture.
What does Lolita actually mean?
Dolores Haze is Humbert's given name for the girl — her actual name is "Dolores," meaning sorrows, and the novel's tragedy is embedded in that name. "Lolita" is a nickname, a diminutive form of "Lola," which is itself a nickname for "Dolores." Humbert's insistence on calling her "Lolita" rather than "Dolores" or "Lo" (as her mother calls her) is itself a form of control: he refuses her her own name and substitutes his own diminutive, his own fantasy object. The novel is also aware that "Lolita" has become a cultural shorthand for a seductive underage girl — a usage that reflects exactly the distortion Humbert's narrative is designed to produce, and which the novel is actually arguing against.
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