50 Years Later, 'Lolita' Still Seduces Readers

[Dave Monroe]

50 Years Later, 'Lolita' Still Seduces Readers
by Madeleine Brand 

Day to Day, September 14, 2005

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin,
my soul."

That's the opening line of Vladimir Nabokov's
groundbreaking novel Lolita -- the story of a
37-year-old man's emotional and sexual love affair
with a 12-year-old girl.

When the book was first published 50 years ago, it was
considered by some to be obscene, to others a
masterpiece of fiction. Over the course of five
decades, the "masterpiece" vote has won out, more or
less -- but even two generations later, there's still
a lot of debate.

Fans of the book say the racy nature of the plot is
secondary to the true art of the words. It's written
in the voice of a man driven to murder by his urge to
love and control the young girl. Nabokov's prose alone
can seduce readers into seeing the man's otherwise
outrageous and criminal point of view.

Nabokov, who fled persecution in Russia and in Nazi
Europe, was a professor of Russian literature at
Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. when he wrote
Lolita, and many of the places described in the book
are easily recognizable by residents today.

The author did tremendous amount of research to get
the details of American life right. "He would do
things like travel on the buses around Ithaca and
record phrases, in a little notebook, from young girls
that he heard coming back from school," says Nabokov
biographer Brian Boyd.

The germ of Lolita was created in 1939 -- a short
story, in Russian, about a man who marries a woman to
get to her daughter. It was not well received, but the
idea never left him. And a decade later, Nabokov took
up the story again in America. And again, some of his
friends were horrified.

The book was rejected by five American publishers,
afraid they'd be prosecuted on obscenity charges. It
was first published in France by Olympia Press, which
put out some serious books and lots of pornography.

Nabokov didn't know that -- he was just relieved
someone agreed to publish his book. And so Lolita
debuted, clad in a plain green cover, in Paris, on
Sept. 15, 1955. It was published in America three
years later and was an immediate hit.

Within a year after the U.S. debut of Lolita, Nabokov
left Cornell. He had earned enough money from the book
that he could afford to stop teaching and write full
time, and he spent the rest of his life in Montreux,
Switzerland. Lolita has so far sold 50 million copies,
and has been translated into dozens of languages.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4846479


		
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