In the same year, in an interview with Life, Nabokov was asked which of his writings had most pleased him. 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.
Russian translation
The Russian translation includes a «Postscriptum» in which Nabokov reconsiders his relationship with his native language. Referring to the afterword in 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.»
Adaptations
Lolita has been adapted as two films, a musical, four stage-plays, one completed opera, and two ballets. There is also Nabokov’s unfilmed (and re-edited) screenplay, an uncompleted opera based on the work, and an «imagined opera» which combines elements of opera and dance.
Film: Lolita was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon as Lolita; Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on this film’s adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen; Stanley Kubrick and James Harris substantially rewrote Nabokov’s script, though neither took credit. The film greatly expanded the character of Clare Quilty, and removed all references to Humbert’s obsession with young girls before meeting Dolores. Veteran arranger Nelson Riddle composed the music for the film, whose soundtrack includes the hit single, «Lolita Ya Ya».
Musical: The book was adapted into a musical in 1971 by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry under the title Lolita, My Love. Critics praised the play for sensitively translating the story to the stage, but it nonetheless closed before it opened in New York. The show was revived in a Musicals in Mufti production at the York Theatre in New York in March 2019 as adapted from several of Lerner’s drafts by Erik Haagensen and a score recovered and directed by Deniz Cordell.
Screenplay: Nabokov’s own re-edited and condensed version of the screenplay (revised December 1973) he originally submitted for Kubrick’s film (before its extensive rewrite by Kubrick and Harris) was published by McGraw-Hill in 1974. One new element is that Quilty’s play The Hunted Enchanter, staged at Dolores’ high school, contains a scene that is an exact duplicate of a painting in the front lobby of the hotel, The Enchanted Hunters, at which Humbert begins a sexual relationship with Lolita.
Play: In 1981 Edward Albee adapted the book into a play, Lolita, with Nabokov (renamed «A Certain Gentleman» after a threatened lawsuit) onstage as a narrator. The troubled production was a fiasco and was savaged by Albee as well as the critics, Frank Rich even predicting fatal damage to Albee’s career. Rich noted that the play’s reading of the character of Quilty seemed to be taken from the Kubrick film.
Opera: In 1992 Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin adapted Lolita into a Russian-language opera Lolita, which premiered in Swedish in 1994 at the Royal Swedish Opera. The first performance in Russian was in Moscow in 2004. The opera was nominated for Russia’s Golden Mask award. Its first performance in German was on 30 April at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden as the opening night of the Internationale Maifestspiele Wiesbaden in 2011. The German version was shortened from four hours to three, but noted Lolita’s death at the conclusion, which had been omitted from the earlier longer version. It was considered well-staged but musically monotonous. In 2001, Shchedrin extracted «symphonic fragments» for orchestra from the opera score, which were published as Lolita-Serenade.
Film: The 1997 film Lolita was directed by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith, and Frank Langella.
Opera: In 1999, the Boston-based composer John Harbison began an opera of Lolita, which he abandoned in the wake of the clergy child abuse scandal in Boston. He abandoned it by 2005, but fragments were woven into a seven-minute piece, «Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera». Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, is a character in Lolita.
Play: In 2003, Russian director Victor Sobchak wrote a second non-musical stage adaptation, which played at the Lion and Unicorn fringe theater in London. It drops the character of Quilty and updates the story to modern England, and includes long passages of Nabokov’s prose in voiceover.
Play: Also in 2003, a stage adaptation of Nabokov’s unused screenplay was performed in Dublin adapted by Michael West. It was described by Karina Buckley (in the Sunday Times of London) as playing more like Italian commedia dell’arte than a dark drama about pedophilia. Hiroko Mikami notes that the initial sexual encounter between Lolita and Humbert was staged in a way that left this adaptation particularly open to the charge of placing the blame for initiating the relationship on Lolita and normalizing child sexual abuse. Mikami challenged this reading of the production, noting that the ultimate devastation of events on Lolita’s life is duly noted in the play.
Ballet: In 2003, Italian choreographer Davide Bombana created a ballet based on Lolita that ran 70 minutes. It used music by Dmitri Shostakovich, György Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke and Salvatore Sciarrino. It was performed by the Grand Ballet de Genève in Switzerland in November 2003. It earned him the award Premio Danza E Danza in 2004 as «Best Italian Choreographer Abroad».
Opera: American composer Joshua Fineberg and choreographer Johanne Saunier created an «imagined opera» of Lolita. Running 70 minutes, it premiered in Montclair, New Jersey in April 2009. While other characters silently dance, Humbert narrates, often with his back to the audience as his image is projected onto video screens. Writing in The New York Times, Steve Smith noted that it stressed Humbert as a moral monster and madman, rather than as a suave seducer, and that it does nothing to «suggest sympathy» on any level of Humbert. Smith also described it as «less an opera in any conventional sense than a multimedia monodrama». The composer described Humbert as «deeply seductive but deeply evil». He expressed his desire to ignore the plot and the novel’s elements of parody, and instead to put the audience «in the mind of a madman». He regarded himself as duplicating Nabokov’s effect of putting something on the surface and undermining it, an effect for which he thought music was especially suited.
Play: In 2009 Richard Nelson created a one-man drama, the only character onstage being Humbert speaking from his jail cell. It premiered in London with Brian Cox as Humbert. Cox believes that this is truer to the spirit of the book than other stage or film adaptations, since the story is not about Lolita herself but about Humbert’s flawed memories of her.
Play: Four Humors created and staged a Minnesota Fringe Festival version called Four Humors Lolita: a Three-Man Show, August 2013. The show was billed as «A one hour stage play, based on the two and a half hour movie by Stanley Kubrick, based on the 5 hour screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, based on the 300 page novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as told by 3 idiots.»
Derivative literary works
The Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco published a short parody of Nabokov’s novel called «Granita» in 1959. It presents the story of Umberto Umberto (Umberto being both the author’s first name and the Italian form of «Humbert») and his illicit obsession with the elderly «Granita».
Jean Kerr wrote a short piece in 1959 called «Can This Romance Be Saved: Lolita and Humbert Consult a Marriage Counselor». It appears as a chapter in her second book, The Snake Has All the Lines. This is a parody in which Lolita and Humbert’s story is told in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal column «Can This Marriage Be Saved?». Lolita voices her rather mundane complaints in a definite voice of her own, and the marriage counselor holds out some hope for their relationship after Humbert is released from prison at age eighty-five, by which time he may be mature enough for Lolita.
Published in 1992, Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita by Kim Morrissey contains poems which purport to be written by Lolita herself, reflecting on the events in the story, a sort of diary in poetry form. Morrissey portrays Lolita as an innocent, wounded soul. In Lolita Unclothed, a documentary by Camille Paglia, Morrissey complains that in the novel Lolita has «no voice». Morrisey’s retelling was adapted into an opera by composer Sid Rabinovitch, and performed at the New Music Festival in Winnipeg in 1993.
Gregor von Rezzori’s Ein Fremder in Lolitaland. Ein Essay («A Stranger in Lolitaland. An Essay», 1993), first published in English by Vanity Fair.
The 1995 novel Diario di Lo by Pia Pera retells the story from Lolita’s point of view, making a few modifications to the story and names. (For example, Lolita does not die, and her last name is now «Maze».) Nabokov’s son sued to halt publication of the English translation (Lo’s Diary); the parties ultimately settled, allowing publication to go forward. «There
