Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

*contains spoilers*

In the year 1949, a decade after initially attempting to write in his own, native, Russian language the embittered story of a man besotted with a “nymphet”, Nabokov finally decided to take the tale that was “throbbing” within him in the intervening years and turn it into a full-blown novel written rather astoundingly in sublime English. In his own beautiful explanatory style, Nabokov stated in his afterword to this text, which itself is a sort of zombie-like addition to the twisted narrative preceding it, that his “private tragedy…is that [he] had to abandon [his] natural idiom…for a second-rate brand of English”, though he is terribly unfair to himself in this respect. He writes with an intimidating flourish of confidence in one of the many secondary languages he spoke, and more crucially in which he wrote, exceeding the articulation many other authors would struggle to attain in their first and only language. Even in writing this summary I find myself awkwardly inept in doing the man’s intellect any semblance of service.

Nabokov imbues the narrating protagonist, Humbert Humbert, with a large portion of this intellect, though with an even larger portion of nihilism to go along with it. This nihilism is, in part, most likely to do with HH’s petrified memory of his first love, Annabel, with whom he fell in love whilst he was living at his uncle’s seaside hotel in France. This love was never fully satisfied aside from a few awkward fumblings on the shore before Annabel’s youthful and untimely death, and, in a moment of mock-Freudian pondering, Humbert suspects that this is why he must be so entranced by the fledgling qualities of “nymphets” – the unfulfilled, latent love for Annabel is thus imprinted on Lolita’s nubile form, and in turn is given new life. Likewise, as Humbert observes Lolita, he notices that she has a childish attraction for him too –possibly because he has replaced her now-dead father as the epitomical male figure – and, as a good-looking European lodger in America, he is able to charm Mrs Charlotte Haze (Lolita’s mother) whilst secretly leering over Dolly’s as yet undeveloped shape.

Humbert’s attraction to Lolita is primarily her youth; when she is away at summer camp, and whilst he marries and settles into a life with Charlotte, he holds “Lo” in the same petrified form he holds Annabel – as an elevated and unattainable image of perfection, one that even begins to trump Annabel through the simple fact of her proximity and corporeality. Nevertheless, when Humbert leaves town after Charlotte’s violent death to pick Lolita up from summer camp, so that he can whisk her away and keep her for himself – to do with what he can – her stance on meeting (and the radical changes that mere weeks can make on the young) veers from his ideal image of the nymphet; “She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed…her face was less pretty…her cheeks looked hollowed…” Any closure that Humbert might hope for as a means of a cure for his perverted inclination is diminished when a trip to the seaside spurs rather than quenches his lust, even after her minor growths and developments protrude and fold here and there; “She was my Lolita again…She was all rose and honey…” The inherent sadness in Humbert’s nostalgia for Lolita’s original image wields a profound power that forms an obsessive love from his nauseating lust.

On the road, Humbert grows to possess and suffocate Dolly, though his stranglehold is loosened somewhat by her eventual, self-acquired agency, learned in defiance at her sanctioned drama classes at Beardsley College. Through this empowering sense of self-control, Lolita is thus able to deceive Humbert with a teasing and mocking self-assurance, to the point where HH realises that “had not something within her been broken by [his oppression]”, she could have gone on to be something great given her natural intelligence. Indeed, Nabokov’s positioning of HH as the narrative God of the piece means that even as she twists his arm through some wily machination, her voice, and her will, are suppressed beneath his own dictatorial perspective. Consequently, as Humbert proposes that it was Lo who initially seduced him for his movie star looks, the reader is instantaneously suspicious of his hedging as a means of self-preservation.

As someone who deeply admires Nabokov’s style whilst utterly abhorring this text’s most tangible character, it was vindicating to read that Nabokov described himself as “neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction”, going on to explain that “a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords…aesthetic bliss…” Reader, envelop your minds in this aesthetic bliss.