最早听到的洛丽塔，是一本小说的名字和一位13岁少女的名字。如果仅从对小说的理解，可以将其单纯地理解为早熟的性感少女以及她和恋童癖的联系，而且有接触西方文化的人会发现，西方人说的“洛丽塔”女孩是那些穿着超短裙，化着成熟妆容但又留着少女刘海的女生，简单来说就是“少女强穿女郎装”的情况。 但是当“洛丽塔”流传到了日本，日本人就将其当成天真可爱少女的代名词，统一将14岁以下的女孩称为“洛丽塔代”，而且态度变成“女郎强穿少女装”，即成熟女人对青涩女孩的向往。 而几乎所有东方型的“洛丽塔”，都以电影《下妻物语》里的宫廷娃娃时装作为标准来打扮自己。港版“洛丽塔”由此而来，而惯于向香港取经的粤版洛丽塔也一样。但不同的是，粤版洛丽塔玩家年龄集中在13－25岁，而且大部分人不超过20岁，十七八岁的这类玩家，她们并不存在要拼命装嫩的需要，更多时候她们追求的是一种崭新的衣着态度，和寻求有别一般的生活方式。
在西方“洛丽塔”是个极有象征意义的名字，意指性感少女、恋童等意，取自一部名为《洛丽塔》的小说，后拍为同名电影，国内亦翻译为《一支梨花压海棠》。套用最近流行的李安导演的那句名言，我们可以说，“每个女孩心里都有一个洛丽塔”，从西方到东方，从日本到香港，再到中国内地，虽然时间漫长了些，但14岁少女洛丽塔那样精灵可爱的女孩形象竟能在全世界引起“轩然大波”，估计是半世纪以前她的创作者根本无法预料到的，她们甚至特别选择人流最密集的商业中心作为自己的秀场，不论你是否接受，她们总是那么骄傲、那么忘我，谁敢说，洛丽塔不是真正高贵的小公主。
洛丽塔-基本资料
由一开始的LOLI是LOLITA的简称，指代可爱、吸引人的幼女（多指7～14岁），源于小说《洛丽塔》到后来文化的延伸，lolita＝形容词，代表萝莉状、可爱的幼女，loli = 幼女，多用在电影以及日本GALGAME文化中。
最近，因为日本和英美的电影文化的影响，使萝莉风格的服装大行其道，LOLITA演变成代表了一种服饰风格，尤其是在日本，LOLITA成为了代表性强的服装品牌，并被越来越多少女推崇，从而渐渐取代了LOLITA指形容词，代表萝莉状、可爱的幼女的地位。
特征
一个女生究竟是不是萝莉，每人的定义都有不同：有以年龄（严格生理年龄）来分的，有以气质（心理年龄、外表年龄）来分的，更严格的是两项标准都要达到的，最后还有自己认为是就当作是的。不过普遍来说有一个重点就是要“尚未发育”或者“发育不全”。
心理
Lolita不单是一种服饰潮流，更是年轻人表达情感需要的方式，或是弥补自信不足的自我保护武装。一如发展心理学家艾力逊指出，年青人正处于“自我认识与迷乱”的阶段，他们往往拥有童真与梦想，有摆脱现实规限的渴求，需要寻找自我，因此以不羁和野性挑战传统，期望得到别人关注、了解、认同和真正接纳。
萝莉有三好：身娇、腰柔、易推倒
类型
小公主型、家中小妹型、女王型、小恶魔型、胆怯娇羞型、小迷糊型、类成熟型
洛丽塔-三大族群
一、SweetLolita———以粉红、粉蓝、白色等粉色系列为主，衣料选用大量蕾丝，务求缔造出洋娃娃般的可爱和烂漫，在广州是最多人选择的造型，走在大街上也不算太张扬。
Sweet Lolita
现今在Lolita界的地位：主流
Sweet Lolita正如其名，属于所有Lolita分类中服饰设计最为甜美的一个派别。Sweet系洋装的布料大多以粉红、粉蓝或白色等粉嫩可爱的单色为主。除此之外，为了能制造出一种仿若洋娃娃般可爱甜美、烂漫纯真的气息，Sweet系洋装通常会在衣物上使用比别的派系 更多的蕾丝和本布褶皱。
近几年来，大约是因为版型与设计经常被山寨的缘故，各家Sweet系洋装品牌纷纷摈弃单色布料，转而使用起各种印有糖果、蛋糕、小动物或描述某个童话场景的印花布料（因为图案特殊且难以仿制，这种布料往往是单此一家别无分店，所以相当能防D版于未然）。
一般来说，Sweet系Lolita洋装往往比其他系别的洋装更能获得初次踏进Lolita世界的女孩们的青睐。
Sweet系Lolita洋装代表品牌：BABY,THE STARS SHINE BRIGH、Angelic Pretty、METAMORPHOSE
二、ClassicalLolita———以简约色调为主，着重剪裁以表达清雅的心思，颜色不出挑，如茶色和白色。蕾丝花边会相应减少，而荷叶褶是最大特色，整体风格比较平实，适合新手。
☆Classical Lolita☆
现今在Lolita界的地位：主流
恰如其名，Classical系Lolita洋装正是所有系别的Lolita洋装中服装款式最为优雅的派别。其洋装设计就好象19世纪英国的贵族少女一般，既古典优雅，又不失纯真可爱。
Classical系Lolita洋装所选用的布料虽然也喜欢以纯色为主，但它所使用的纯色料子一定都有着素雅得体又不刺眼的色调。除开白、黑、粉、蓝这四个基本色之外，各式各样美丽的碎花布也是Classical系洋装布料的爱用之选。
与Sweet系Lolita洋装不同，除了古典系蕾丝之外，Classical系 Lolita洋装极少会在衣物上使用到大量造型平平、质地一般的蕾丝。在衣服上每个需要用到花边的地方，Classical系Lolita洋装基本上都会以与衣服相同质地的本布褶皱来代替蕾丝。而Classical系洋装所选用的布料颜色亦非常素雅，除了白、黑、粉、蓝这四个基本色之外，各式各样美丽的碎花布也是Classical系洋装布料的常用者。
总而言之，Classical系Lolita洋装的特色就是“简约而不简单”。由于款式简单大方、优雅不凡，Classical系Lolita洋装比其他系别的Lolita洋装更适合日常穿着，也更容易被家长及大众所接受。当少女们厌倦了造型过于夸张的Sweet系Lolita洋装和非常不日常的 Gothic系Lolita洋装后，Classical系Lolita洋装就顺理成章地成为了她们的必然选择与最终选择。 有意思的是，最能穿出Classical系Lolita洋装韵味的人居然并不是青春活泼的高初中女生，而是那些年纪在20以上的、因为工作和阅历的缘故而拥有了沉静气质的年轻女子。看来在现实中，“气质”能与“年轻”完美并存的实例果然屈指可数呢。
代表品牌：Mary Magdalene、Victorian maiden、JULIETTE & JUSTINE Lolita不是Cosplay：前者代表生活态度，后者更加强调角色模仿 gothiclolita
三、GothicLolita———主色是黑和白，特征是想表达神秘恐怖和死亡的感觉。通常配以十字架银器等装饰，以及化较为浓烈的深色妆容，如黑色指甲、眼影、唇色，强调神秘色彩。
☆Gothic Lolita☆
现今在Lolita界的地位：主流
首先需要注意的是，Gothic Lolita与纯正的Gothic是完全不同的，大家千万不要把它们混为一谈——因为以正常人的眼光来看，纯粹的Gothic根本就是“妖魔鬼怪般的人物”。而Gothic Lolita虽然在服饰设计上也弥漫着相当浓厚的Gothic味，但它至少还能给人以小恶魔般另类的可爱天真之感。
其次，那些认为凡是用黑白色面料制作的Lolita洋装就一定属于Gothic系Lolita洋装的想法也是错误的。事实上，即使采用完全相同的面料进行衣物制作，那些出自不同派系之手的Lolita洋装也依旧会在观感上存在着极易分辨的明显差异——
就算图里的模特都穿着黑色的洋装，但人们还是能从款式和造型上轻易认出谁才是甜嫩可爱的Sweet系Lolita洋装、谁又是如同死神般冷淡孤高的 Gothic系Lolita洋装的。
几乎97％以上的Gothic系Lolita洋装都只采用了黑色和白色的单色布料，像粉红、嫩黄之类的可爱颜色可是与这个系别完全绝缘的。此外，Gothic系Lolita洋装也是所有类别的Lolita洋装中最常使用皮质材料的派别。难怪在国内的某些地方，是否穿着使用上等小羊皮制作的束腰会成为了外行人判断此人是否Gothic系Lolita少女的唯一标准了。
除了单调的布料用色之外，Gothic系Lolita少女们最爱使用的配饰，也是最能表现出Gothic那股混合了“恐怖”、“纯真”、“神秘”、 “绝望”、“忧郁”、“死亡”与“禁忌”这七大主题的独有气息的各类小物（如黑色指甲油、十字架和骷髅银饰等）。
Elegant Gothic Lolita 此外，Gothic系Lolita洋装中还存在着两个比较特别的分支——EGL Lolita及EGA Lolita。EGL Lolita的全称是“Elegant Gothic Lolita”（即“雅致歌特Lolita”）。它的款式设计一般偏向传统古典，虽与Gothic Lolita非常接近，却又多带了点吸血鬼的感觉。而EGA Lolita的全称则是“Elegant Gothic Aristocrat”（即“雅致歌特贵族”），其服装款式一般为男装、长裙、裤子和领尖定有纽扣的衬衣及外套。
与其他系别的Lolita洋装比起来，集优雅华丽与黑暗诡异于一身的Gothic Lolita可谓是最受欧美人热爱和着迷的Lolita风格。也许这是因为Gothic系Lolita洋装的设计中充满了神秘及诱惑的禁欲色彩，所以更能引起深受基督教影响之人的共鸣罢。
代表品牌：Moi-meme-Moitie、Mille Fleur
洛丽塔-相关评论
事实上“女性化”本来就是个没有什么具体概念的词，而“洛丽塔”的女性化无非是拥有少女式的性感和犹如小狐狸精般的狡黠。
其实没有“洛丽塔”情结的女人就像是过于成熟的水果，失去了青涩带来的回味。于是，那些缀满白色的黑色的花边裙子，胸前的绑带把我们带回到逝去的懵懂岁月，那不仅仅是单纯意义上的装嫩，而是对于自己的最好奖励，允许自己生活在非现实的世界中，鼓励自己犯那些小小的错误，甚至有那么一点残忍和邪恶。
这种时尚可能是从一部日剧开始大肆蔓延并在明星的率领下成为时尚的，在日剧《下妻物语》中，深田恭子的“洛丽塔”扮相将这一风尚推向顶点。令日本街头的穿着也形成了三股不同的风尚，“甜美可爱洛丽塔”多为甜美可人的风格，以粉色为主，运用大量蕾丝褶皱裙，表现出洋娃娃般的可人形象；“哥特式洛丽塔”在欧美尤其流行，以黑色为主，弥漫着死亡气息的恐怖与优雅，可以配上黑色的指甲油和唇膏，缔造颓废的气质；“经典洛丽塔”则是最简单的入门款，裙身多为荷叶边，透过碎花和粉色表现出清纯的感觉。
这种流行风从日本通过香港迅速蔓延到中国内地，让那些身着“公主装”的女人们以时尚的借口开始肆意装嫩，而这种装嫩的境界也不再停留于原有的“师出无名”了。
时尚界自然也不会错过任何一个可以大做文章的由头，在这个洛丽塔般“小妖精” 横行的年代，时尚精英们纷纷向懵懂和叛逆致敬，他们和普通大众一起进入一场拒绝长大的游戏中。年轻且性感的装扮，并不难做到，因此近年来，蕾丝花边和蝴蝶结曾风靡一时，且风头不减。连Dior在今年的秀场上也用华丽和不同季节服装的混搭，制造出早熟的摩登小女郎风格，硕大的太阳眼镜，女人味十足的皮草搭配芥末黄的百褶裙和吊带上衣，性感清纯一个都不能少。
After its publication, Nabokov's Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious girl. The novel was adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne.
Lolita is included on TIME's 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is fourth on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.
Plot summary
Lolita is divided into two parts and 36 short chapters. It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 to a Swiss father and an English mother in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as "nymphets". Humbert suggests that this obsession results from the death of a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh. In 1947, Humbert moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze, a widow. While Charlotte tours him around the house, he meets her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L), with whom he falls in love at first sight. Humbert stays at the house only to remain with her. While he is infatuated with Lolita, a highly intelligent and articulate, albeit tempestuous teenage girl, he disdains of her preoccupation with contemporary American popular culture, such as teen movies and comic books.
While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, tells him that he must either marry her or move out. Humbert reluctantly agrees in order to continue living near Lolita. Charlotte is oblivious of Humbert's distaste and pity for her, and his lust for Lolita, until she reads his diary. Upon learning of Humbert's true feelings and intentions, Charlotte is appalled. She makes plans to flee with Lolita, and threatens to expose Humbert's perversions. But as she runs across the street in a state of shock, she is struck and killed by a passing car.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, pretending that Charlotte is ill in a hospital. He does not return to Charlotte's home out of fear that the neighbors will be suspicious. Instead, he takes Lolita to a hotel, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert attempts to use sleeping pills on Lolita so that he may molest her without her knowledge, but they have little effect on her. Instead, she initiates sex. He discovers that he is not her first lover, as she had sex with a boy at summer camp. Humbert reveals to Lolita that Charlotte is actually dead; Lolita has no choice but to accept her stepfather into her life on his terms.
Lolita and Humbert drive around the country, moving from state to state and motel to motel. Humbert initially keeps the girl under control by threatening her with reform school; later he bribes her for sexual favors, though he knows that she does not reciprocate his love and shares none of his interests. The novel's first part ends after he rapes her. After a year touring North America, the two settle down in another New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in school. Humbert is very possessive and strict, forbidding Lolita to take part in after-school activities or to associate with boys; the townspeople, however, see this as the action of a loving and concerned, while old fashioned, parent.
Lolita begs to be allowed to take part in the school play; Humbert reluctantly grants his permission in exchange for more sexual favors. The play is written by Clare Quilty. He is said to have attended a rehearsal and been impressed by Lolita's acting. Just before opening night, Lolita and Humbert have a ferocious argument, which culminates in Lolita saying she wants to leave town and resume their travels.
As Lolita and Humbert drive westward again, Humbert gets the feeling that their car is being tailed and he becomes increasingly paranoid, suspecting that Lolita is conspiring with others in order to escape. She falls ill and must convalesce in a hospital; Humbert stays in a nearby motel, without Lolita for the first time in years. One night, Lolita disappears from the hospital; the staff tell Humbert that Lolita's "uncle" checked her out. Humbert embarks upon a frantic search to find Lolita and her abductor, but eventually he gives up.
One day in 1952, Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert goes to see Lolita, giving her money in exchange for the name of the man who abducted her. She reveals the truth: Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's and the writer of the school play, checked her out of the hospital and attempted to make her star in one of his pornographic films; when she refused, he threw her out. She worked odd jobs before meeting and marrying her husband, who knows nothing about her past.
Humbert asks Lolita to leave her husband and return to him, but she refuses, and he breaks down in tears. He leaves Lolita, and kills Quilty at his mansion, shooting him to death in an act of revenge. He then is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road and swerving. The narrative closes with Humbert's final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well, and reveals the novel in its metafiction to be the memoirs of his life, only to be published after he and Lolita have both died.
According to the novel's fictional "Foreword", Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. Lolita dies giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952.
Style and interpretation
The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with word play and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used "faunlet." One of the novel's characters, "Vivian Darkbloom," is an anagram for author Vladimir Nabokov.
Several times, Humbert begs the reader to understand that he is not proud of his union with Lolita, but is filled with remorse. At one point, he is listening to the sounds of children playing outdoors, and is stricken with guilt at the realization that he robbed Lolita of her childhood.
Some critics have accepted Humbert's version of events at face value. In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that the theme of Lolita is "not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child. This is no pretty theme, but it is one with which social workers, magistrates and psychiatrists are familiar."
Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov's powers as an ironist. For Richard Rorty, in his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity." Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person" (quoted in Levine, 1967).
Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, Koba the Dread, proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood (though Nabokov states in his Afterword that he "[detests] symbols and allegories"). Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. "Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies", he says. "Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny."
In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about a covert women's reading group. For Nafisi, the essence of the novel is Humbert's solipsism and his erasure of Lolita's independent identity. She writes: "Lolita was given to us as Humbert's creature [...] To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own [...] Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses."
One of the novel's early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: "we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [...] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting."[citation needed]
Publication and reception
Due to its subject matter, Nabokov was unable to find an American publisher for Lolita after finishing it in 1953. After four refusals, he finally resorted to Olympia Press in Paris, September 1955. Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, there were no substantial reviews. Eventually, at the end of 1955, Graham Greene, in an interview with the (London) Times, called it one of the best novels of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the (London) Sunday Express, whose editor called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." British Customs officers were then instructed by a panicked Home Office to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom. In December 1956, the French followed suit and the Minister of the Interior banned Lolita (the ban lasted for two years). Its eventual British publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson caused a scandal that contributed to the end of the political career of one of the publishers, Nigel Nicolson.
By complete contrast, American officials were initially nervous, but the first American edition was issued without problems by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1958, and was a bestseller, the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication. The first official translation of the book was the Danish edition, which was published in 1957.
Today, it is considered by many to be one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest English language novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. Nabokov rated the book highly himself. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962 he said,
Lolita is a special favourite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.
Two years later, in 1964's interview for Playboy, he said,
I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.
At the same year, in the interview for Life, Nabokov was asked, "Which of your writings has pleased you most?" He answered,
I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.
Sources and links
Links in Nabokov's work
In 1939, Nabokov wrote a novella Volshebnik (Волшебник) that was published only posthumously in 1986 in English translation as The Enchanter. It can be seen as an early version of Lolita but with significant differences: it takes place in Central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide. The theme of ephebophilia was already touched on by Nabokov in his short story A Nursery Tale, written in 1926. Also, in the 1932 Laughter in the Dark, Margot Peters is sixteen and already had an affair when middle-aged Albinus is attracted to her.
In chapter three of the novel The Gift (written in Russian in 1935–1937) the similar gist of Lolita's first chapter is outlined to the protagonist Fyodor Cherdyntsev by his obnoxious landlord Shchyogolev as an idea of a novel he would write "if I only had the time": a man marries a widow only to gain access to her young daughter, who however resists all his passes. Shchyogolev says it happened "in reality" to a friend of his; it is made clear to the reader that it concerns himself and his stepdaughter Zina (fifteen at the time of marriage) who becomes the love of Fyodor's life and his child bride.
In April 1947 Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: "I am writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls–and it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea...." The work expanded into Lolita during the next eight years. Nabokov used the title A Kingdom by the Sea in his 1974 pseudo-autobiographic novel Look at the Harlequins! for a Lolita-like book written by the narrator who, in addition, travels with his teenage daughter Bel from motel to motel after the death of her mother; later, his fourth wife is Bel's look-alike and shares her birthday.
In the unfinished novel The Original of Laura, published posthumously, a character Hubert H. Hubert appears, an older man preying upon then-child protagonist, Flora. Unlike in Lolita, his advances are unsuccessful.
Allusions/references to other works
* In the Foreword, there is a reference to "the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933 by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken book"—that is, the decision in the case United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, in which Woolsey ruled that James Joyce's novel was not obscene and could be sold in the United States.
* Humbert Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh, is named after the "maiden" in the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe, and their young love is described in phrases borrowed from Poe's poem. Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea, drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's work. A passage at the end of Chapter 1 — "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns" — is also a reference to the poem. ("With a love that the winged seraphs in heaven / Coveted her and me.")
* Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym.
* Humbert Humbert's field of expertise is French literature (one of his jobs is writing a series of educational works that compare French writers to English writers), and as such there are several references to French literature, including the authors Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, Charles Baudelaire, Prosper Mérimée, Remy Belleau, Honoré de Balzac, and Pierre de Ronsard.
* In chapter 17 of Part I, Humbert quotes "to hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss" from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
* In chapter 35 of Part II, Humbert's "death sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday.
* The line "I cannot get out, said the starling" from Humbert's poem is taken from a passage in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, "The Passport, the Hotel De Paris."
Possible real-life prototypes
According to Alexander Dolinin, the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner, kidnapped in 1948 by a 50-year-old mechanic Frank La Salle, who had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle traveled with her over various states for 21 months and is believed to have raped her. He claimed that he was an FBI agent and threatened to “turn her in” for the theft and to send her to "a place for girls like you." The Horner case was not widely reported, but Dolinin adduces various similarities in events and descriptions.
The problem with this suggestion is that Nabokov had already used the same basic idea — that of a child molester and his victim booking into an hotel as man and daughter — in his then-unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik (Волшебник). This is not to say, however, that Nabokov could not have drawn on some details of the case in writing Lolita, and the La Salle case is mentioned explicitly in Chapter 33 of Part II:
Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?
Heinz von Lichberg's "Lolita"
German academic Michael Maar's book The Two Lolitas describes his recent discovery of a 1916 German short story titled "Lolita" about a middle-aged man travelling abroad who takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the preteen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Maar has speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia (a "hidden memory" of the story that Nabokov was unaware of) while he was composing Lolita during the 1950s. Maar says that until 1937 Nabokov lived in the same section of Berlin as the author, Heinz von Eschwege (pen name: Heinz von Lichberg), and was most likely familiar with his work, which was widely available in Germany during Nabokov's time there. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in the article "Lolita at 50: Did Nabokov take literary liberties?" says that, according to Maar, accusations of plagiarism should not apply and quotes him as saying: "Literature has always been a huge crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast... Nothing of what we admire in Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter." See also Jonathan Lethem in Harper's Magazine on this story.
Nabokov's afterword
In 1956, Nabokov penned an afterword to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita") that was included in every subsequent edition of the book.
One of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is, despite John Ray Jr.'s claim in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story.
In the afterword, Nabokov wrote that "the initial shiver of inspiration" for Lolita "was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage". Neither the article nor the drawing has been recovered.
In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel", Nabokov wrote that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct".
Nabokov concluded the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English".
Russian translation
Nabokov translated Lolita into Russian; the translation was published by Phaedra in New York in 1967.
The translation includes a "Postscriptum" in which Nabokov reconsiders his relationship with his native language. Referring to the afterword to the English edition, Nabokov states that only "the scientific scrupulousness led me to preserve the last paragraph of the American afterword in the Russian text..." He further explains that the "story of this translation is the story of a disappointment. Alas, that 'wonderful Russian language' which, I imagined, still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks rather like a lock pick."
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The 1962 adaptation's movie poster art.
The 1997 movie poster art.
* Lolita has been filmed twice: the first adaptation was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon as Lolita; and a second adaptation in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Melanie Griffith. Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the earlier film's adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen. The more recent version was given mixed reviews by critics. It was delayed for over a year because of its controversial subject matter, and was not released in Australia until 1999.
* Nabokov's own version of the screenplay (dated Summer 1960 and revised December 1973) for Kubrick's film was published by McGraw-Hill in 1974.
* The book was adapted into a musical in 1971 by librettist/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer John Barry under the title Lolita, My Love. Critics were surprised at how sensitively the story was translated to the stage, but the show nonetheless closed on the road before it opened in New York.
* In 1982, Edward Albee adapted the book into a non-musical play. It was savaged by critics, Frank Rich notably attributing the temporary death of Albee's career to it.
* In 2003, Russian director Victor Sobchak wrote a second non-musical stage adaptation, which played in England at the Lion and Unicorn Fringe Theater in London. It drops the character of Quilty and updates the story to modern England.
* Rodion Shchedrin adapted Lolita into a Russian language opera, which premiered in Moscow in 2006 and was published that same year. It had a much earlier performance in Sweden in 1992. It was nominated for Russia's Golden Mask award.
* The Boston-based composer John Harbison began an opera of Lolita, which he abandoned in the wake of the clergy child-abuse scandal that rocked Boston. Fragments of what he had done were woven into seven-minute piece "Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera". Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, is a character in Lolita.
References in other media
* The novel Lo's Diary by Pia Pera retells the story from Lolita's point of view, making major plot changes on the premise that Humbert's version is incorrect on many points. Lolita is characterized as being quite sadistic and manipulative.
* The collection Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita by Kim Morrissey takes the form of a series of poems written by Lolita herself reflecting on the events in the story, a sort of diary in poetry form. In strong contrast to Pera's novel, Morrissey portrays Lolita as an innocent, wounded soul. Morrissey had earlier done a stage adaptation of Sigmund Freud's famous Dora case.
* Steve Martin wrote the short story "Lolita at Fifty" (included in his collection Pure Drivel), which is a gently humorous look at how Dolores Haze's life might have turned out.
* In The Police song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" about a schoolgirl's crush on her teacher, the teacher "starts to shake and cough just like the old man in that book by Nabokov." The singer mispronounces Nabokov's name.
* The lyrics of the song "Posters", a song by the rock band Dada about a girl who leads the (male) narrator to her room, includes the line "She asked me if I ever read Lolita."
* In the 1999 film American Beauty, the lead character's name, Lester Burnham, is an anagram of "Humbert learns".
* The 2001 Album Gourmandises by the French singer-songwriter Alizee featured her most successful single Moi... Lolita which reached number one in several countries in Europe and East Asia
* The 2007 Marilyn Manson song and music video for "Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)" draws strong influence from Lolita, largely inspired by the comparable age difference between Manson and girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood.
* In Katy Perry's song 'One of the Boys', she mentions Lolita. "I studied Lolita religiously"
* The 2010 song "Lolita" by Mexican singer Belinda was inspired by the story.
* On their 2010 album, the band Glass Wave dedicates a song to Lolita. The lyrics are sung in her own voice.
* In the Red Dwarf episode Marooned, David Lister is forced to burn books to keep warm after crashing on an Ice Planet. When asking if he can burn Lolita, Arnold Rimmer advises him to "save page sixty eight". Lister reads it, calls it "disgusting" then slips it into his jacket and burns the rest.
* In the novel Pretty Little Liars, Hanna makes a silent reference when she catches a 40 year old man staring at her and Mona. She looks at him and thinks "A regular Humbert Humbert", but doesn't speak aloud because Mona wouldn't understand the literary reference and she had only read it in the first place because "Lolita looked deliciously dirty."
Further reading
* Appel, Alfred Jr. (1991). The Annotated Lolita (revised ed.). New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-72729-9. One of the best guides to the complexities of Lolita. First published by McGraw-Hill in 1970. (Nabokov was able to comment on Appel's earliest annotations, creating a situation that Appel described as being like John Shade revising Charles Kinbote's comments on Shade's poem Pale Fire. Oddly enough, this is exactly the situation Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd proposed to resolve the literary complexities of Nabokov's Pale Fire.)
* Levine, Peter (1967). "Lolita and Aristotle's Ethics" in Philosophy and Literature Volume 19, Number 1, April 1995, pp. 32–47.
* Nabokov, Vladimir (1955). Lolita. New York: Vintage International. ISBN 0-679-72316-1. The original novel.
在西方“洛丽塔”是个极有象征意义的名字，意指性感少女、恋童等意，取自一部名为《洛丽塔》的小说，后拍为同名电影，国内亦翻译为《一支梨花压海棠》。套用最近流行的李安导演的那句名言，我们可以说，“每个女孩心里都有一个洛丽塔”，从西方到东方，从日本到香港，再到中国内地，虽然时间漫长了些，但14岁少女洛丽塔那样精灵可爱的女孩形象竟能在全世界引起“轩然大波”，估计是半世纪以前她的创作者根本无法预料到的，她们甚至特别选择人流最密集的商业中心作为自己的秀场，不论你是否接受，她们总是那么骄傲、那么忘我，谁敢说，洛丽塔不是真正高贵的小公主。
洛丽塔-基本资料
由一开始的LOLI是LOLITA的简称，指代可爱、吸引人的幼女（多指7～14岁），源于小说《洛丽塔》到后来文化的延伸，lolita＝形容词，代表萝莉状、可爱的幼女，loli = 幼女，多用在电影以及日本GALGAME文化中。
最近，因为日本和英美的电影文化的影响，使萝莉风格的服装大行其道，LOLITA演变成代表了一种服饰风格，尤其是在日本，LOLITA成为了代表性强的服装品牌，并被越来越多少女推崇，从而渐渐取代了LOLITA指形容词，代表萝莉状、可爱的幼女的地位。
特征
一个女生究竟是不是萝莉，每人的定义都有不同：有以年龄（严格生理年龄）来分的，有以气质（心理年龄、外表年龄）来分的，更严格的是两项标准都要达到的，最后还有自己认为是就当作是的。不过普遍来说有一个重点就是要“尚未发育”或者“发育不全”。
心理
Lolita不单是一种服饰潮流，更是年轻人表达情感需要的方式，或是弥补自信不足的自我保护武装。一如发展心理学家艾力逊指出，年青人正处于“自我认识与迷乱”的阶段，他们往往拥有童真与梦想，有摆脱现实规限的渴求，需要寻找自我，因此以不羁和野性挑战传统，期望得到别人关注、了解、认同和真正接纳。
萝莉有三好：身娇、腰柔、易推倒
类型
小公主型、家中小妹型、女王型、小恶魔型、胆怯娇羞型、小迷糊型、类成熟型
洛丽塔-三大族群
一、SweetLolita———以粉红、粉蓝、白色等粉色系列为主，衣料选用大量蕾丝，务求缔造出洋娃娃般的可爱和烂漫，在广州是最多人选择的造型，走在大街上也不算太张扬。
Sweet Lolita
现今在Lolita界的地位：主流
Sweet Lolita正如其名，属于所有Lolita分类中服饰设计最为甜美的一个派别。Sweet系洋装的布料大多以粉红、粉蓝或白色等粉嫩可爱的单色为主。除此之外，为了能制造出一种仿若洋娃娃般可爱甜美、烂漫纯真的气息，Sweet系洋装通常会在衣物上使用比别的派系 更多的蕾丝和本布褶皱。
近几年来，大约是因为版型与设计经常被山寨的缘故，各家Sweet系洋装品牌纷纷摈弃单色布料，转而使用起各种印有糖果、蛋糕、小动物或描述某个童话场景的印花布料（因为图案特殊且难以仿制，这种布料往往是单此一家别无分店，所以相当能防D版于未然）。
一般来说，Sweet系Lolita洋装往往比其他系别的洋装更能获得初次踏进Lolita世界的女孩们的青睐。
Sweet系Lolita洋装代表品牌：BABY,THE STARS SHINE BRIGH、Angelic Pretty、METAMORPHOSE
二、ClassicalLolita———以简约色调为主，着重剪裁以表达清雅的心思，颜色不出挑，如茶色和白色。蕾丝花边会相应减少，而荷叶褶是最大特色，整体风格比较平实，适合新手。
☆Classical Lolita☆
现今在Lolita界的地位：主流
恰如其名，Classical系Lolita洋装正是所有系别的Lolita洋装中服装款式最为优雅的派别。其洋装设计就好象19世纪英国的贵族少女一般，既古典优雅，又不失纯真可爱。
Classical系Lolita洋装所选用的布料虽然也喜欢以纯色为主，但它所使用的纯色料子一定都有着素雅得体又不刺眼的色调。除开白、黑、粉、蓝这四个基本色之外，各式各样美丽的碎花布也是Classical系洋装布料的爱用之选。
与Sweet系Lolita洋装不同，除了古典系蕾丝之外，Classical系 Lolita洋装极少会在衣物上使用到大量造型平平、质地一般的蕾丝。在衣服上每个需要用到花边的地方，Classical系Lolita洋装基本上都会以与衣服相同质地的本布褶皱来代替蕾丝。而Classical系洋装所选用的布料颜色亦非常素雅，除了白、黑、粉、蓝这四个基本色之外，各式各样美丽的碎花布也是Classical系洋装布料的常用者。
总而言之，Classical系Lolita洋装的特色就是“简约而不简单”。由于款式简单大方、优雅不凡，Classical系Lolita洋装比其他系别的Lolita洋装更适合日常穿着，也更容易被家长及大众所接受。当少女们厌倦了造型过于夸张的Sweet系Lolita洋装和非常不日常的 Gothic系Lolita洋装后，Classical系Lolita洋装就顺理成章地成为了她们的必然选择与最终选择。 有意思的是，最能穿出Classical系Lolita洋装韵味的人居然并不是青春活泼的高初中女生，而是那些年纪在20以上的、因为工作和阅历的缘故而拥有了沉静气质的年轻女子。看来在现实中，“气质”能与“年轻”完美并存的实例果然屈指可数呢。
代表品牌：Mary Magdalene、Victorian maiden、JULIETTE & JUSTINE Lolita不是Cosplay：前者代表生活态度，后者更加强调角色模仿 gothiclolita
三、GothicLolita———主色是黑和白，特征是想表达神秘恐怖和死亡的感觉。通常配以十字架银器等装饰，以及化较为浓烈的深色妆容，如黑色指甲、眼影、唇色，强调神秘色彩。
☆Gothic Lolita☆
现今在Lolita界的地位：主流
首先需要注意的是，Gothic Lolita与纯正的Gothic是完全不同的，大家千万不要把它们混为一谈——因为以正常人的眼光来看，纯粹的Gothic根本就是“妖魔鬼怪般的人物”。而Gothic Lolita虽然在服饰设计上也弥漫着相当浓厚的Gothic味，但它至少还能给人以小恶魔般另类的可爱天真之感。
其次，那些认为凡是用黑白色面料制作的Lolita洋装就一定属于Gothic系Lolita洋装的想法也是错误的。事实上，即使采用完全相同的面料进行衣物制作，那些出自不同派系之手的Lolita洋装也依旧会在观感上存在着极易分辨的明显差异——
就算图里的模特都穿着黑色的洋装，但人们还是能从款式和造型上轻易认出谁才是甜嫩可爱的Sweet系Lolita洋装、谁又是如同死神般冷淡孤高的 Gothic系Lolita洋装的。
几乎97％以上的Gothic系Lolita洋装都只采用了黑色和白色的单色布料，像粉红、嫩黄之类的可爱颜色可是与这个系别完全绝缘的。此外，Gothic系Lolita洋装也是所有类别的Lolita洋装中最常使用皮质材料的派别。难怪在国内的某些地方，是否穿着使用上等小羊皮制作的束腰会成为了外行人判断此人是否Gothic系Lolita少女的唯一标准了。
除了单调的布料用色之外，Gothic系Lolita少女们最爱使用的配饰，也是最能表现出Gothic那股混合了“恐怖”、“纯真”、“神秘”、 “绝望”、“忧郁”、“死亡”与“禁忌”这七大主题的独有气息的各类小物（如黑色指甲油、十字架和骷髅银饰等）。
Elegant Gothic Lolita 此外，Gothic系Lolita洋装中还存在着两个比较特别的分支——EGL Lolita及EGA Lolita。EGL Lolita的全称是“Elegant Gothic Lolita”（即“雅致歌特Lolita”）。它的款式设计一般偏向传统古典，虽与Gothic Lolita非常接近，却又多带了点吸血鬼的感觉。而EGA Lolita的全称则是“Elegant Gothic Aristocrat”（即“雅致歌特贵族”），其服装款式一般为男装、长裙、裤子和领尖定有纽扣的衬衣及外套。
与其他系别的Lolita洋装比起来，集优雅华丽与黑暗诡异于一身的Gothic Lolita可谓是最受欧美人热爱和着迷的Lolita风格。也许这是因为Gothic系Lolita洋装的设计中充满了神秘及诱惑的禁欲色彩，所以更能引起深受基督教影响之人的共鸣罢。
代表品牌：Moi-meme-Moitie、Mille Fleur
洛丽塔-相关评论
事实上“女性化”本来就是个没有什么具体概念的词，而“洛丽塔”的女性化无非是拥有少女式的性感和犹如小狐狸精般的狡黠。
其实没有“洛丽塔”情结的女人就像是过于成熟的水果，失去了青涩带来的回味。于是，那些缀满白色的黑色的花边裙子，胸前的绑带把我们带回到逝去的懵懂岁月，那不仅仅是单纯意义上的装嫩，而是对于自己的最好奖励，允许自己生活在非现实的世界中，鼓励自己犯那些小小的错误，甚至有那么一点残忍和邪恶。
这种时尚可能是从一部日剧开始大肆蔓延并在明星的率领下成为时尚的，在日剧《下妻物语》中，深田恭子的“洛丽塔”扮相将这一风尚推向顶点。令日本街头的穿着也形成了三股不同的风尚，“甜美可爱洛丽塔”多为甜美可人的风格，以粉色为主，运用大量蕾丝褶皱裙，表现出洋娃娃般的可人形象；“哥特式洛丽塔”在欧美尤其流行，以黑色为主，弥漫着死亡气息的恐怖与优雅，可以配上黑色的指甲油和唇膏，缔造颓废的气质；“经典洛丽塔”则是最简单的入门款，裙身多为荷叶边，透过碎花和粉色表现出清纯的感觉。
这种流行风从日本通过香港迅速蔓延到中国内地，让那些身着“公主装”的女人们以时尚的借口开始肆意装嫩，而这种装嫩的境界也不再停留于原有的“师出无名”了。
时尚界自然也不会错过任何一个可以大做文章的由头，在这个洛丽塔般“小妖精” 横行的年代，时尚精英们纷纷向懵懂和叛逆致敬，他们和普通大众一起进入一场拒绝长大的游戏中。年轻且性感的装扮，并不难做到，因此近年来，蕾丝花边和蝴蝶结曾风靡一时，且风头不减。连Dior在今年的秀场上也用华丽和不同季节服装的混搭，制造出早熟的摩登小女郎风格，硕大的太阳眼镜，女人味十足的皮草搭配芥末黄的百褶裙和吊带上衣，性感清纯一个都不能少。
After its publication, Nabokov's Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious girl. The novel was adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne.
Lolita is included on TIME's 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is fourth on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.
Plot summary
Lolita is divided into two parts and 36 short chapters. It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 to a Swiss father and an English mother in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as "nymphets". Humbert suggests that this obsession results from the death of a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh. In 1947, Humbert moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze, a widow. While Charlotte tours him around the house, he meets her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L), with whom he falls in love at first sight. Humbert stays at the house only to remain with her. While he is infatuated with Lolita, a highly intelligent and articulate, albeit tempestuous teenage girl, he disdains of her preoccupation with contemporary American popular culture, such as teen movies and comic books.
While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, tells him that he must either marry her or move out. Humbert reluctantly agrees in order to continue living near Lolita. Charlotte is oblivious of Humbert's distaste and pity for her, and his lust for Lolita, until she reads his diary. Upon learning of Humbert's true feelings and intentions, Charlotte is appalled. She makes plans to flee with Lolita, and threatens to expose Humbert's perversions. But as she runs across the street in a state of shock, she is struck and killed by a passing car.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, pretending that Charlotte is ill in a hospital. He does not return to Charlotte's home out of fear that the neighbors will be suspicious. Instead, he takes Lolita to a hotel, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert attempts to use sleeping pills on Lolita so that he may molest her without her knowledge, but they have little effect on her. Instead, she initiates sex. He discovers that he is not her first lover, as she had sex with a boy at summer camp. Humbert reveals to Lolita that Charlotte is actually dead; Lolita has no choice but to accept her stepfather into her life on his terms.
Lolita and Humbert drive around the country, moving from state to state and motel to motel. Humbert initially keeps the girl under control by threatening her with reform school; later he bribes her for sexual favors, though he knows that she does not reciprocate his love and shares none of his interests. The novel's first part ends after he rapes her. After a year touring North America, the two settle down in another New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in school. Humbert is very possessive and strict, forbidding Lolita to take part in after-school activities or to associate with boys; the townspeople, however, see this as the action of a loving and concerned, while old fashioned, parent.
Lolita begs to be allowed to take part in the school play; Humbert reluctantly grants his permission in exchange for more sexual favors. The play is written by Clare Quilty. He is said to have attended a rehearsal and been impressed by Lolita's acting. Just before opening night, Lolita and Humbert have a ferocious argument, which culminates in Lolita saying she wants to leave town and resume their travels.
As Lolita and Humbert drive westward again, Humbert gets the feeling that their car is being tailed and he becomes increasingly paranoid, suspecting that Lolita is conspiring with others in order to escape. She falls ill and must convalesce in a hospital; Humbert stays in a nearby motel, without Lolita for the first time in years. One night, Lolita disappears from the hospital; the staff tell Humbert that Lolita's "uncle" checked her out. Humbert embarks upon a frantic search to find Lolita and her abductor, but eventually he gives up.
One day in 1952, Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert goes to see Lolita, giving her money in exchange for the name of the man who abducted her. She reveals the truth: Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's and the writer of the school play, checked her out of the hospital and attempted to make her star in one of his pornographic films; when she refused, he threw her out. She worked odd jobs before meeting and marrying her husband, who knows nothing about her past.
Humbert asks Lolita to leave her husband and return to him, but she refuses, and he breaks down in tears. He leaves Lolita, and kills Quilty at his mansion, shooting him to death in an act of revenge. He then is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road and swerving. The narrative closes with Humbert's final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well, and reveals the novel in its metafiction to be the memoirs of his life, only to be published after he and Lolita have both died.
According to the novel's fictional "Foreword", Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. Lolita dies giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952.
Style and interpretation
The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with word play and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used "faunlet." One of the novel's characters, "Vivian Darkbloom," is an anagram for author Vladimir Nabokov.
Several times, Humbert begs the reader to understand that he is not proud of his union with Lolita, but is filled with remorse. At one point, he is listening to the sounds of children playing outdoors, and is stricken with guilt at the realization that he robbed Lolita of her childhood.
Some critics have accepted Humbert's version of events at face value. In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that the theme of Lolita is "not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child. This is no pretty theme, but it is one with which social workers, magistrates and psychiatrists are familiar."
Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov's powers as an ironist. For Richard Rorty, in his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity." Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person" (quoted in Levine, 1967).
Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, Koba the Dread, proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood (though Nabokov states in his Afterword that he "[detests] symbols and allegories"). Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. "Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies", he says. "Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny."
In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about a covert women's reading group. For Nafisi, the essence of the novel is Humbert's solipsism and his erasure of Lolita's independent identity. She writes: "Lolita was given to us as Humbert's creature [...] To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own [...] Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses."
One of the novel's early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: "we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [...] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting."[citation needed]
Publication and reception
Due to its subject matter, Nabokov was unable to find an American publisher for Lolita after finishing it in 1953. After four refusals, he finally resorted to Olympia Press in Paris, September 1955. Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, there were no substantial reviews. Eventually, at the end of 1955, Graham Greene, in an interview with the (London) Times, called it one of the best novels of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the (London) Sunday Express, whose editor called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." British Customs officers were then instructed by a panicked Home Office to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom. In December 1956, the French followed suit and the Minister of the Interior banned Lolita (the ban lasted for two years). Its eventual British publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson caused a scandal that contributed to the end of the political career of one of the publishers, Nigel Nicolson.
By complete contrast, American officials were initially nervous, but the first American edition was issued without problems by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1958, and was a bestseller, the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication. The first official translation of the book was the Danish edition, which was published in 1957.
Today, it is considered by many to be one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest English language novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. Nabokov rated the book highly himself. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962 he said,
Lolita is a special favourite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.
Two years later, in 1964's interview for Playboy, he said,
I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.
At the same year, in the interview for Life, Nabokov was asked, "Which of your writings has pleased you most?" He answered,
I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.
Sources and links
Links in Nabokov's work
In 1939, Nabokov wrote a novella Volshebnik (Волшебник) that was published only posthumously in 1986 in English translation as The Enchanter. It can be seen as an early version of Lolita but with significant differences: it takes place in Central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide. The theme of ephebophilia was already touched on by Nabokov in his short story A Nursery Tale, written in 1926. Also, in the 1932 Laughter in the Dark, Margot Peters is sixteen and already had an affair when middle-aged Albinus is attracted to her.
In chapter three of the novel The Gift (written in Russian in 1935–1937) the similar gist of Lolita's first chapter is outlined to the protagonist Fyodor Cherdyntsev by his obnoxious landlord Shchyogolev as an idea of a novel he would write "if I only had the time": a man marries a widow only to gain access to her young daughter, who however resists all his passes. Shchyogolev says it happened "in reality" to a friend of his; it is made clear to the reader that it concerns himself and his stepdaughter Zina (fifteen at the time of marriage) who becomes the love of Fyodor's life and his child bride.
In April 1947 Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: "I am writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls–and it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea...." The work expanded into Lolita during the next eight years. Nabokov used the title A Kingdom by the Sea in his 1974 pseudo-autobiographic novel Look at the Harlequins! for a Lolita-like book written by the narrator who, in addition, travels with his teenage daughter Bel from motel to motel after the death of her mother; later, his fourth wife is Bel's look-alike and shares her birthday.
In the unfinished novel The Original of Laura, published posthumously, a character Hubert H. Hubert appears, an older man preying upon then-child protagonist, Flora. Unlike in Lolita, his advances are unsuccessful.
Allusions/references to other works
* In the Foreword, there is a reference to "the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933 by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken book"—that is, the decision in the case United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, in which Woolsey ruled that James Joyce's novel was not obscene and could be sold in the United States.
* Humbert Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh, is named after the "maiden" in the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe, and their young love is described in phrases borrowed from Poe's poem. Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea, drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's work. A passage at the end of Chapter 1 — "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns" — is also a reference to the poem. ("With a love that the winged seraphs in heaven / Coveted her and me.")
* Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym.
* Humbert Humbert's field of expertise is French literature (one of his jobs is writing a series of educational works that compare French writers to English writers), and as such there are several references to French literature, including the authors Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, Charles Baudelaire, Prosper Mérimée, Remy Belleau, Honoré de Balzac, and Pierre de Ronsard.
* In chapter 17 of Part I, Humbert quotes "to hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss" from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
* In chapter 35 of Part II, Humbert's "death sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday.
* The line "I cannot get out, said the starling" from Humbert's poem is taken from a passage in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, "The Passport, the Hotel De Paris."
Possible real-life prototypes
According to Alexander Dolinin, the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner, kidnapped in 1948 by a 50-year-old mechanic Frank La Salle, who had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle traveled with her over various states for 21 months and is believed to have raped her. He claimed that he was an FBI agent and threatened to “turn her in” for the theft and to send her to "a place for girls like you." The Horner case was not widely reported, but Dolinin adduces various similarities in events and descriptions.
The problem with this suggestion is that Nabokov had already used the same basic idea — that of a child molester and his victim booking into an hotel as man and daughter — in his then-unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik (Волшебник). This is not to say, however, that Nabokov could not have drawn on some details of the case in writing Lolita, and the La Salle case is mentioned explicitly in Chapter 33 of Part II:
Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?
Heinz von Lichberg's "Lolita"
German academic Michael Maar's book The Two Lolitas describes his recent discovery of a 1916 German short story titled "Lolita" about a middle-aged man travelling abroad who takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the preteen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Maar has speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia (a "hidden memory" of the story that Nabokov was unaware of) while he was composing Lolita during the 1950s. Maar says that until 1937 Nabokov lived in the same section of Berlin as the author, Heinz von Eschwege (pen name: Heinz von Lichberg), and was most likely familiar with his work, which was widely available in Germany during Nabokov's time there. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in the article "Lolita at 50: Did Nabokov take literary liberties?" says that, according to Maar, accusations of plagiarism should not apply and quotes him as saying: "Literature has always been a huge crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast... Nothing of what we admire in Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter." See also Jonathan Lethem in Harper's Magazine on this story.
Nabokov's afterword
In 1956, Nabokov penned an afterword to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita") that was included in every subsequent edition of the book.
One of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is, despite John Ray Jr.'s claim in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story.
In the afterword, Nabokov wrote that "the initial shiver of inspiration" for Lolita "was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage". Neither the article nor the drawing has been recovered.
In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel", Nabokov wrote that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct".
Nabokov concluded the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English".
Russian translation
Nabokov translated Lolita into Russian; the translation was published by Phaedra in New York in 1967.
The translation includes a "Postscriptum" in which Nabokov reconsiders his relationship with his native language. Referring to the afterword to the English edition, Nabokov states that only "the scientific scrupulousness led me to preserve the last paragraph of the American afterword in the Russian text..." He further explains that the "story of this translation is the story of a disappointment. Alas, that 'wonderful Russian language' which, I imagined, still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks rather like a lock pick."
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The 1962 adaptation's movie poster art.
The 1997 movie poster art.
* Lolita has been filmed twice: the first adaptation was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon as Lolita; and a second adaptation in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Melanie Griffith. Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the earlier film's adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen. The more recent version was given mixed reviews by critics. It was delayed for over a year because of its controversial subject matter, and was not released in Australia until 1999.
* Nabokov's own version of the screenplay (dated Summer 1960 and revised December 1973) for Kubrick's film was published by McGraw-Hill in 1974.
* The book was adapted into a musical in 1971 by librettist/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer John Barry under the title Lolita, My Love. Critics were surprised at how sensitively the story was translated to the stage, but the show nonetheless closed on the road before it opened in New York.
* In 1982, Edward Albee adapted the book into a non-musical play. It was savaged by critics, Frank Rich notably attributing the temporary death of Albee's career to it.
* In 2003, Russian director Victor Sobchak wrote a second non-musical stage adaptation, which played in England at the Lion and Unicorn Fringe Theater in London. It drops the character of Quilty and updates the story to modern England.
* Rodion Shchedrin adapted Lolita into a Russian language opera, which premiered in Moscow in 2006 and was published that same year. It had a much earlier performance in Sweden in 1992. It was nominated for Russia's Golden Mask award.
* The Boston-based composer John Harbison began an opera of Lolita, which he abandoned in the wake of the clergy child-abuse scandal that rocked Boston. Fragments of what he had done were woven into seven-minute piece "Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera". Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, is a character in Lolita.
References in other media
* The novel Lo's Diary by Pia Pera retells the story from Lolita's point of view, making major plot changes on the premise that Humbert's version is incorrect on many points. Lolita is characterized as being quite sadistic and manipulative.
* The collection Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita by Kim Morrissey takes the form of a series of poems written by Lolita herself reflecting on the events in the story, a sort of diary in poetry form. In strong contrast to Pera's novel, Morrissey portrays Lolita as an innocent, wounded soul. Morrissey had earlier done a stage adaptation of Sigmund Freud's famous Dora case.
* Steve Martin wrote the short story "Lolita at Fifty" (included in his collection Pure Drivel), which is a gently humorous look at how Dolores Haze's life might have turned out.
* In The Police song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" about a schoolgirl's crush on her teacher, the teacher "starts to shake and cough just like the old man in that book by Nabokov." The singer mispronounces Nabokov's name.
* The lyrics of the song "Posters", a song by the rock band Dada about a girl who leads the (male) narrator to her room, includes the line "She asked me if I ever read Lolita."
* In the 1999 film American Beauty, the lead character's name, Lester Burnham, is an anagram of "Humbert learns".
* The 2001 Album Gourmandises by the French singer-songwriter Alizee featured her most successful single Moi... Lolita which reached number one in several countries in Europe and East Asia
* The 2007 Marilyn Manson song and music video for "Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)" draws strong influence from Lolita, largely inspired by the comparable age difference between Manson and girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood.
* In Katy Perry's song 'One of the Boys', she mentions Lolita. "I studied Lolita religiously"
* The 2010 song "Lolita" by Mexican singer Belinda was inspired by the story.
* On their 2010 album, the band Glass Wave dedicates a song to Lolita. The lyrics are sung in her own voice.
* In the Red Dwarf episode Marooned, David Lister is forced to burn books to keep warm after crashing on an Ice Planet. When asking if he can burn Lolita, Arnold Rimmer advises him to "save page sixty eight". Lister reads it, calls it "disgusting" then slips it into his jacket and burns the rest.
* In the novel Pretty Little Liars, Hanna makes a silent reference when she catches a 40 year old man staring at her and Mona. She looks at him and thinks "A regular Humbert Humbert", but doesn't speak aloud because Mona wouldn't understand the literary reference and she had only read it in the first place because "Lolita looked deliciously dirty."
Further reading
* Appel, Alfred Jr. (1991). The Annotated Lolita (revised ed.). New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-72729-9. One of the best guides to the complexities of Lolita. First published by McGraw-Hill in 1970. (Nabokov was able to comment on Appel's earliest annotations, creating a situation that Appel described as being like John Shade revising Charles Kinbote's comments on Shade's poem Pale Fire. Oddly enough, this is exactly the situation Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd proposed to resolve the literary complexities of Nabokov's Pale Fire.)
* Levine, Peter (1967). "Lolita and Aristotle's Ethics" in Philosophy and Literature Volume 19, Number 1, April 1995, pp. 32–47.
* Nabokov, Vladimir (1955). Lolita. New York: Vintage International. ISBN 0-679-72316-1. The original novel.