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Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Nabokov’s original instructions for the book cover:

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Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

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  1. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Nabokov’s original instructions for the book cover: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. … Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.” And yet, representations of the ‘sexy girl’ abound. Also, we would do well in noting that no covers feature the necessarily problematic HH. How can we account for this?.....

  2. Inspiration for Lolita….. Nabokov on his novel as recounted in the essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita”: After a doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one--may strike me, in fact-- as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book.

  3. Inspiration for Lolita…. Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as "What is the author’s purpose?" or still worse "What is the guy trying to say?" Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book, has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Inter-reaction of Inspiration and Combination-- which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.

  4. Inspiration for Lolita: Music & The Fairy Tale There's also some evidence that music (classical Russian ballet) and European fairy tales may have influenced Nabokov's Lolita. In "Ballet Attitudes," Susan Elizabeth Sweeney writes: "Indeed, Lolita echoes specific aspects of the plotting, characters, scenery, and choreography of The Sleeping Beauty." 

  5. Inspiration for Lolita: Music & The Fairy Tale The novel's unreliable narrator, Humber Humbert, also seems to see himself as part of a fairy tale. He's on "an enchanted island," after all. And, he's "under a nymphet's spell." Before him is an "intangible island of entranced time," and he's enchanted with erotic fantasies--all focused on, and revolving around his obsession with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze. He specifically romanticizes his "little princess," as an incarnation of Annabel Leigh (Nabokov was an avid fan of Edgar Allan Poe, and there are a number of allusions to the life and works of the very-odd Poe in Lolita).

  6. Inspiration for Lolita: Music & The Fairy Tale Other elements of famous fairy tales also make their way into the text: • Lost slipper ("Cinderella") • "gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock" ("Beauty and the Beast") • She eats a red apple ("Sleeping Beauty") • Quilty also says to Humbert: "That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say."

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