Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. He studied literature in England during his college years. His life was drastically altered when, as a young man staying in Berlin, he learned that his father, an outspoken political activist, had been assassinated a short time before the Russian Revolution began; this may in part explain his fascination with the sudden, unexpected deaths that occur so frequently in Lolita. Nabokov lived his life on the move, escaping his native Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and then moving to Germany. He escaped Germany and moved to France after the Nazis assumed power in the 1930s. He then escaped France and came to America in 1940 just before the Germans captured Paris. In 1961, he left the United States and moved to Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1977.

In America, Nabokov taught at a series of colleges, including Harvard, Wellesley, Stanford, and Cornell. With the release of Lolita, which he began writing during World War II and published in 1955, he achieved national fame, allowing him to write full time. He produced a number of highly successful works in English and Russian, including Pale Fire,Mary,Pnin, and the non-fiction Speak, Memory. A highly aesthetic writer, most of his work shows an amazing interest in and talent for language.

Contextually, Lolita may be viewed as a novel about explicit sexual desire. The book was one of a series of novels in the 20th century that was deemed obscene by many readers, although in general the 20th century saw a great liberalization of sexual taboos in literature. Beginning with the writings of Freud, writers pursued more frequently the topic of sexual desire and activity, seen most notably in the work of D.H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in many areas for its sexually explicit content. In 1922, James Joyce published the monumental Ulysses, another sexually explicit book that contains a scene depicting masturbation. As a result, it was banned in America by the customs authorities until a court decision in 1933 (referred to in the Foreword). Lolita continues the literary exploration of sex, turning to the unnatural and deeply disturbing realm of pedophilia and sexual slavery.

No definitive explanation can be given for what exactly Nabokov is trying to tell us with this book. We do best, however, to view it as a work of literary art combined with a psychological exploration of a man with a serious mental problem. Lolita, like most of Nabokov's novels, forces the reader to empathize with marginal characters. Undoubtedly, Humbert is a bad human being, but one of the great tactics of the novel is its method of forcing the reader to understand Humbert through a beautiful manipulation of language. This is a novel of literary and sexual jokes ranging from the most high-brow and obscure to the most vulgar. The book has something for everyone, and it is safe to say that it is fully understood by no one. It remains, however, Nabokov's crowning achievement, and will likely be the work for which he is best remembered. Not only is it Nabokov's best book, but it is easily one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.