Lolita

About the Author
    Born into a multilingual, cultured family in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov would become one of the greatest masters of English and Russian letters. Nabokov’s aristocratic childhood was spent reading great literature in French, English, and Russian, including Poe, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. His father was an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism and was one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. Following the Bolshevik revolution, the family went into exile, and the elder Nabokov was killed at a political rally in Berlin by right-wing assassins. During his family’s exile, Nabokov attended Trinity College, Cambridge University where he studied Slavic and romance languages.
    Over two decades in Berlin and Paris, Nabokov emerged as a prominent émigré writer, with a prolific outpouring that included 10 novels in Russian, as well as short stories, plays, and poems. Writing under the pseudonym “Vladimir Sirin,” he also supported himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and composing crossword puzzles in Russian. With his wife, Véra, and one son, Dmitiri, Nabokov moved to the United States in 1940. He taught Russian, creative writing, and literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard Universities while achieving universal renown as an English prose stylist, poet, critic, and translator. His first novel written in English,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, was published in 1941. While in America, Nabokov penned arguably some of his greatest works—
Bend Sinister
(1947),
Lolita
(1955),
Pnin
(1957), and
Pale Fire
(1962)—and also translated his earlier Russian novels into English. After the monumental success of
Lolita
, Nabokov moved with his family to Montreux, Switzerland in 1961, where he resided until his death in 1977. His final novel,
The Original of Laura
, was published posthumously in 2009.

About the Book
    Published in 1955, 
Lolita
 became an instant sensation, establishing Vladimir Nabokov’s reputation as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century. It is an unforgettable and immaculate masterpiece on obsession.
    Humbert Humbert, erstwhile college professor, aesthete and tortured romantic is a self-professed ‘nympholept.’ Lolita is the impossibly funny and rapturously beautiful story of Humbert’s total, catastrophic obsession with twelve-year-old Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze. At once prim and predatory, Humbert will stop at nothing in his frenzy to possess his ‘nymphet’, first marrying her mother and then embarking with Lolita on a journey across the American landscape, through roadside diners and five-dollar-a-night motels.
    Brimming with gloriously flamboyant word play, 
Lolita
 displays the unparalleled prose style of a master of the English language in a story that also emerges as a transcendent satire on American consumerism.
    Shockingly tender and beautiful, 
Lolita
 is suffused with an incandescent wit, sensual detail and articulations of longing and lust that are at once exquisite and grotesque.

SECOND VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 1997
    Copyright © 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov
    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in hardcover, in France by the Olympia Press in 1955 and in the United States by the Putnam Publishing Group, Inc., in 1958. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.
    The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
    eISBN: 978-0-307-74402-9
    www.vintagebooks.com

to Véra

Foreword
    “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity,
of
coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now
of
the District
of
Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation
of
“Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor
of
his choice