In Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire, the titular poem by fictional John Shade mentions Hurricane Lolita coming up the American east coast in 1958, and narrator Charles Kinbote (in the commentary later in the book) notes it, questioning why anyone would have chosen an obscure Spanish nickname for a hurricane. There were no hurricanes named Lolita that year, but that is the year that Lolita was published in North America.
The unfinished novel The Original of Laura, published posthumously, features the character Hubert H. Hubert, an older man preying upon the then-child protagonist, Flora. Unlike those of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Hubert’s advances are unsuccessful.
Literary pastiches, allusions and prototypes
The novel abounds in allusions to classical and modern literature. Virtually all of them have been noted in The Annotated Lolita, edited and annotated by Alfred Appel Jr. Many are references to Humbert’s own favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe.
Humbert’s first love, Annabel Leigh, is named after the «maiden» in the poem «Annabel Lee» by Poe; this poem is alluded to many times in the novel, and its lines are borrowed to describe Humbert’s love. A passage in chapter 11 reuses verbatim Poe’s phrase «…by the side of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride». In the opening of the novel, the phrase «Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied,» is a pastiche of two passages of the poem, the «winged seraphs of heaven» (line 11), and «The angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying her and me» (lines 21–22). 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 variant of this line is reprised in the opening of chapter one, which reads «…had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea».
Humbert Humbert’s double name recalls Poe’s «William Wilson», a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling the presence of Humbert’s own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym. The theme of the doppelgänger also occurs in Nabokov’s earlier novel, Despair.
Chapter 26 of Part One contains a parody of Joyce’s stream of consciousness.
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, Rémy Belleau, Honoré de Balzac, and Pierre de Ronsard.
Nabokov was fond of the works of Lewis Carroll, and had translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian. He even called Carroll the «first Humbert Humbert». Lolita contains a few brief allusions in the text to the Alice books, though overall Nabokov avoided direct allusions to Carroll. In her book, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin, Joyce Milton claims that a major inspiration for the novel was Charlie Chaplin’s relationship with his second wife, Lita Grey, whose real name was Lillita and is often misstated as Lolita. Graham Vickers in his book Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again argues that the two major real-world predecessors of Humbert are Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin. Although Appel’s comprehensive Annotated Lolita contains no references to Charlie Chaplin, others have picked up several oblique references to Chaplin’s life in Nabokov’s book. Bill Delaney notes that at the end Lolita and her husband move to the fictional Alaskan town of «Gray Star» while Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, set in Alaska, was originally set to star Lita Grey. Lolita’s first sexual encounter was with a boy named Charlie Holmes, whom Humbert describes as «the silent … but indefatigable Charlie». Chaplin had an artist paint Lita Grey in imitation of Joshua Reynolds’s painting The Age of Innocence. When Humbert visits Lolita in a class at her school, he notes a print of the same painting in the classroom. Delaney’s article notes many other parallels as well.
The foreword refers 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 Joyce’s Ulysses was not obscene and could be sold in the United States.
In chapter 29 of Part Two, Humbert comments that Lolita looks «like Botticelli’s russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty,» referencing Sandro Botticelli’s depiction of Venus in, perhaps, The Birth of Venus or Venus and Mars.
In chapter 35 of Part Two, Humbert’s «death sentence» on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday.
Many other references to classical and Romantic literature abound, including references to Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and to the poetry of Laurence Sterne.
Other possible real-life prototypes
In addition to the possible prototypes of Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin, Alexander Dolinin suggests that the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner, kidnapped in 1948 by 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 notes various similarities in events and descriptions.
While Nabokov had already used the same basic idea—that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as father and daughter—in his then-unpublished 1939 work The Enchanter (Волшебник), he mentions the Horner case explicitly in Chapter 33 of Part II of Lolita: «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 discovery of a 1916 German short story titled «Lolita» whose middle-aged narrator describes travelling abroad as a student. He 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 («hidden memory») 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’s essay «The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism» in Harper’s Magazine on this story.
Nabokov on Lolita
Afterword
In 1956, Nabokov wrote an afterword to Lolita («On a Book Entitled Lolita») that first appeared in the first U.S. edition and has appeared thereafter.
One of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is that, despite John Ray Jr.’s claim in the foreword, there is no moral to the story.
Nabokov adds 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 writes that «the substitution of ‘English language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct.»
Nabokov concludes 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.»
Estimation
Nabokov rated the book highly. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962, he said:
Lolita is a special favorite 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.
Over a year later, in an interview for Playboy, he said:
No, 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
