The Lolita Phenomenon in Vladimir Nabokov., Marteiały do pracy, Lolita
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Introduction
The
Lolita
phenomenon
What is here termed ‘the Lolita phenomenon’ is envisaged as something rather
broader than just another glance at the text of this particular novel and its
controversial reception. It also involves at least the noting of assorted pre-texts, a
difficult publishing history, a screenplay by Nabokov, two film adaptations and
an ever-raging debate over the ever-sensitive issues of paedophilia and child
abuse.
SOME PRECURSORS
When publishing his third collection of short stories in English, in 1975,
Nabokov claimed that he was “eerily startled to meet a somewhat decrepit but
unmistakable Humbert escorting his nymphet in the story I wrote almost half a
century ago” (TD 43). In the story in question, “A Nursery Tale” of 1926, we
indeed encounter:
… a tall elderly man in evening clothes with a little girl walking beside – a child of
fourteen or so in a low-cut black party dress. ... [the protagonist’s] glance lit on the
face of the child mincing at the old poet’s side; there was something odd about that
face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a
little girl – the old man’s granddaughter, no doubt – one might suspect that her lips
were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her
legs moved close together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing
voice ... (
57)
, a decade or so
later, Boris Ivanovich Shchyogolev has his own familial situation (with
step-daughter Zina Mertz) in mind when he proposes the following plot for a
novel:
Alice in Wonderland
into Russian. In
The Gift
From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog – but still in his prime, fiery,
thirsting for happiness – gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a
little girl – you know what I mean – when nothing is formed yet, but already she has a
way of walking that drives you out of your mind – A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with
blue under the eyes – and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do?
Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the
three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely – the temptation, the eternal torment,
the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot – a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older,
she blossoms out – and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of
contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? (
G
172-3)
TD
Even earlier, in 1924, it is worth remembering, Nabokov had translated
Lewis Carroll’s
12
Lolita From Nabokov to Kubrick and Lyne
Here we have, almost in
mise en abyme
, two future works:
The Enchanter
and
Lolita
. The reference to Dostoevsky evokes Svidrigailov’s dream in
Crime and
(involving temptation from the blandishments of a five-year-old
girl), “Stavrogin’s Confession” in
The Devils
(in which an abused girl of twelve
commits suicide), and precocious sexuality in the lesser known and uncompleted
Netochka Nezvanova
. A novel from the Russian “Silver Age” treating somewhat
similar themes is Fyodor Sologub’s
The Little Demon
(1907).
What the above quotation from
The Gift
does, then, all but encompass –
though without the disastrous ending tacked on – is Nabokov’s novella
The
Enchanter
, written in 1939 (as
Volshebnik
), and forgotten or lost for many years
before its publication in Dmitri Nabokov’s English translation in 1986. It is clear
from a letter of 1959 that Nabokov did himself contemplate reviving this work
for print (see
SL
282-3;
E
15-16); it was scarcely, however, quite “the first little
throb of
Lolita
”, as seemingly recollected in 1956 – no more than it had been
totally lost or destroyed, as then thought (
E
11-12). The unnamed enchanter’s
ambition toward his twelve-year-old and cynically acquired stepdaughter is “to
take disinterested care of her, to meld the wave of fatherhood with the wave of
sexual love” (
E
49). His voluntary death on the road, as Alfred Appel points out,
is “in a manner which Nabokov will transfer [in
Lolita
] to Charlotte Haze”
(
xxxviii). It also appears to be evoked in the later novel when, in a state of
insomnia at the Enchanted Hunters hotel, Humbert is aware of “the despicable
haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night” (
130).
“Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which had never
quite ceased, began to plague me again”, Nabokov recalled (
E
13). Other,
perhaps minor, impulses had already restarted this throbbing a little earlier.
Adam Krug, the protagonist of
L
, Nabokov’s first novel written in
America (in 1945-1946), experiences the following dream about his teenage
housemaid (soon revealed as a spy):
Bend Sinister
On the night of the twelfth, he dreamt that he was surreptitiously enjoying Mariette
while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she
was supposed to be his daughter. (
BS
148).
Later, in an introduction (dated 1963) to the English version, Nabokov
confirms that this amoral and treacherous young temptress had been consigned to
the tender fate of gang-rape: “the dummies are at last in quite dreadful pain, and
pretty Mariette gently bleeds, staked and torn by the lust of 40 soldiers” (
BS
8).
-like
vocabulary and motifs are clearly and admittedly visible (with hindsight), in
sadistic association with lust and fatality (or, indeed, execution):
L’Après-midi d’un faune
is said to have haunted Krug, while
Lolita
Death, too, is a ruthless interruption; the widower’s heavy sensuality seeks a pathetic
outlet in Mariette, but as he avidly clasps the haunches of the chance nymph he is
about to enjoy, a deafening din at the door breaks the throbbing rhythm forever.
(
BS
10)
Laughter in the Dark
), who is not.
Notwithstanding his verdict, in a letter to Edmund Wilson of 1947, on
Maisie Knew
as “terrible” (
NW
182), and his declared antipathy to Henry James, it
What
Punishment
L
Mallarmé’s
Mariette, who is mortally punished, may be reminiscent of Margot (of
The
Lolita
phenomenon
13
In any
event, Nabokov certainly parodied the Jamesian style on occasions and one may
suspect that, in the case of James, as with Dostoevsky and certain others,
Nabokov’s megaphoned distaste is at least partly attributable to a Bloomian anxiety
of influence – the author in question having prematurely anticipated Nabokovian
elements but without, of course, executing them quite to Nabokov’s satisfaction.
Almost at the very beginning of the composition of
Lolita
, in 1948, Edmund
Wilson supplied Nabokov with volume six of Havelock Ellis’s
Etudes de Psychol-
ogie Sexuelle
(Paris, 1926), which contains a 100-page confessional document
written in French by an anonymous southern Russian: “Havelock Ellis’s Russian
sex masterpiece”, as Wilson terms it (
NW
201), to which Nabokov rejoined:
1
I enjoyed the Russian’s love-life hugely. It is wonderfully funny. As a boy, he seems
to have been quite extraordinarily lucky in coming across girls with unusually rapid
and rich reactions. The end is rather bathetic. (
NW
202)
This apparently authentic disclosure, written down for Havelock Ellis,
purports to record the detailed sexual history of the scion of an upper-crust
Russian family (resident in Kiev), who develops from precociously over-sexed
adolescent debauchery, involving young females of all classes, through a lengthy
period of abstinence in Italy, which finally degenerates into paedophilia,
voyeurism and masturbatory obsession amid Neapolitan child prostitution. The
raconteur, now known as “Victor X”, is remarkable (in Nabokovian terms) for
his insistence on imagination as “the most important factor in sexual pleasure”,
leading to his claim that “I can get no enjoyment unless I can imagine the
woman’s enjoyment”.
2
of Italian society – until, that is, he allows himself to be entrapped
in “the Babylon” of Naples.
While comparisons between Nabokov’s protagonists and Victor should not
be exaggerated, there are undeniable common factors; as Donald Rayfield
(Victor’s subsequent translator into English) has written, there is “the disastrous
inability to find sexual arousal and satisfaction in anything but young girls” and,
moreover:
The basic structure of
Lolita
and the confessions is similar: the contrast
between the homeland (Russia or France) and the attempt to recreate lost expe-
mores
”, in
The Turn of the Screw
and
What Maisie Knew
, ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone (Basingstoke and London:
Macmillan, “New Casebooks”, 1998), 179-93, writes: “
Lolita
is surely a burlesque of
What
Maisie Knew
and also an exercise in slippery self-parody”, at p. 190. On Nabokov and James,
see Gregory (1984); plus Neil Cornwell, “Paintings, Governesses and ‘Publishing Scoundrels’:
Nabokov and Henry James,
Nabokov’s World. Volume 2: Reading Nabokov
, ed. Jane Grayson,
Arnold McMillin and Priscilla Meyer (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 96-116.
2. Rayfield (1984), 74.
What Maisie Knew
is difficult to believe that the closing stages, at least, of that novel, in which the
barely teenage eponymous heroine proposes co-habitation to her stepfather Sir
Claude, did not strike a chord with Nabokov, as author of
The Enchanter
and
future creator of Lolita (and the word “terrible” may even be ambiguous).
Victor is unusually passive in his activities for much of
his “career” and restrains himself from immoral compulsion when he encounters
(thanks, as in the case of Humbert, to the helping hand of a rich uncle) the
stricter
1. Barbara Eckstein, “Unsquaring the Square of
14
Lolita From Nabokov to Kubrick and Lyne
rience in exile (Italy or America). both Victor and Humbert Humbert are pris-
oners of their first childhood sexual experiences.
1
“‘Sexual confessions’ (in Havelock Ellis and elsewhere), which involve tiny
tots mating like mad” are mentioned in
Speak, Memory
(
SM
158), and were
elaborated slightly further in the Russian version (
Drugie berega
), which refers to
“a particularly Babylonian contribution from a landowner [from the Ukraine]”.
2
MOMENTUM AND PUBLICATION
These proto-tales and pre-texts notwithstanding,
Lolita
, of course, took on an
overwhelming novelistic momentum of its own: a switch from third-person to
first-person narration, a new tone in a new world – that of the post-war America
which Nabokov had experienced through the 1940s and was now to re-create in
fictional form at the age of fifty. Nabokov later claimed to have written
Lolita
between 1949 and the spring of 1954 (
L
312). As early as April 1947, however,
he had told Wilson that he was writing “a short novel about a man who liked
little girls – and it’s going to be called
The Kingdom by the Sea
” (
N-W
188). In
the early stages the heroine was to have been called “Juanita Dark” and Nabokov
was now using his index-card method of composition, adapted from lepidop-
teral research; field trips for the latter also provided Nabokov with a detailed
topographical knowledge of many American states, while he also undertook
investigations into teenage slang and relevant criminal cases. Work progressed
slowly, between academic and lepidopteral exertions, but a diary entry of
December 6 1953 reads: “Finished
Lolita
which was begun exactly five years
ago” (
B Am
226).
Nabokov anticipated publishing difficulties and embarrassing repercussions
from the start; accordingly, he proposed putting the novel out under an assumed
name. A clue to its true authorship, however, was the inclusion of a minor char-
acter anagrammatically styled “Vivian Darkbloom” (later to achieve further
renown as the annotator of
Ada
). In the course of 1954, five prominent Amer-
ican publishers turned the novel down – Simon and Schuster, for one, regarding
it as “sheer pornography” (
B Am
262). In August that year Nabokov had asked
his French agent to find him a European publisher, and in February 1955 he
sent the manuscript to Paris, hoping that Sylvia Beach might repeat her trium-
phant publication of
Ulysses
. Instead of the by now inactive Beach, however,
Lolita
attracted Maurice Girodias, proprietor of the Olympia Press. Girodias,
who made his reputation in the 1950s by publishing avant-garde literary works
in English of unorthodox content (including Beckett, Henry Miller, Lawrence
Durrell, William Burroughs; and Jean Genet in translation) as well as
unashamed pornography of a much lower class, quickly offered terms and
Nabokov accepted with alacrity. Thus began the lengthy saga of legal and finan-
cial wrangles that were to complicate the novel’s eventual appearance in
America. Meanwhile, Cornell sensibilities notwithstanding, Nabokov had
1. Ibid. 141.
2. Nabokov,
Sobranie sochinenii
(Moscow, 1990), 4, 250; see also Rayfield, 140. Dolinin
(1993) adds a story by a minor émigré writer named Valentin Samsonov as another possible
source; see also Ernest Machen’s letter in
TLS
(27 November, 1998), 17.
The
Lolita
phenomenon
15
heeded advice that pseudonymous publication might prejudice American courts
against
Lolita
.
In October 1955 Nabokov received his first advance copies (having corrected
galleys, but not page proofs); typographical errors there still were, but author’s
copyright had been withheld. A literary row in Great Britain, following Graham
Greene’s advocacy of
Lolita
, and a contract for a French translation with Galli-
mard soon raised the novel’s profile and American publishers began to bite. A
package of
Lolita
excerpts with accompanying critical apparatus was devised for
June 1957 publication in an occasional journal named
Anchor Review
. Copies of
the Olympia Press edition, which had turned up on the black market in New
York, were seized and then released by United States customs. A temporary
French ban on an Olympia Press list that included
Lolita
struck a note of farce,
at a time when a French-language edition was in legal preparation, along with
translations for major presses in Germany and Italy. In 1958 the French ban was
rescinded, Harris-Kubrick Pictures bought the film rights and, in August, with
copyright problems now sorted out,
Lolita
was finally published by Putnam’s in
New York – only to become “the first book since
Gone with the Wind
to sell
100,00 copies in its first three weeks” (
B Am
365). Having soon reached number
one on the best-seller list,
Lolita
was displaced – greatly to Nabokov’s fury – by
Doctor Zhivago
.
Obstacles to
Lolita
’s appearance in Britain continued a little longer. The
passing of the Obscene Publications Bill, however, improved the legal climate at
just the right time and Weidenfeld and Nicolson took a chance on publication
of the novel in November 1959. Nigel Nicolson, himself a Conservative MP at
the time, received an anonymous mid-launch-party tip-off that the book was not
to be prosecuted. Although bans still came and went in a number of other coun-
tries (including France once again for a while),
Lolita
was now firmly on her
way. By the mid-1980s worldwide sales had reportedly reached fourteen million
copies (
B Am
387).
SOME GUIDELINES TO READING
Lolita
was, of course, greeted controversially on publication. There is no space
here for a survey its reception;
1
neither, for that matter, can anything amounting
to an overall analysis of the novel be attempted. In amplification of an outline
history of
Lolita
as cultural phenomenon, however, some minimal basic guide-
lines and suggestions for approaching the text should be delineated.
Lolita
is one of the richest texts in twentieth-century literature in its use of
quotation and allusion. Extratextual references and internal reverberations, long
since collated in force, continue to be pinpointed and elaborated.
2
Poe,
Mérimée and Proust are usually considered the most relevant authors in this
respect, with a mass of others (including Shakespeare, Goethe, de Sade, Joyce
1. See Olsen (1995), 16-25, for one recent account. On reactions at Cornell to
Lolita
, see
Diment (1997) passim (but especially pp. 60-8 and 141-6).
2. See Appel’s notes to
The Annotated Lolita
(
L
) .Proffer (1968), 21-3, lists over 60 names.
Further notes have been supplied by Brian Boyd in
Novels 1955-1962
(1996), 873-91.
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