Girl Misinterpreted

Did Vladimir Nabokov “pilfer” the story of a real-life US childabduction case for his novel Lolita as a new book claims? Brian Boyd sets out to disprove the theory and skewer the many lurid misreadings of the literary classic.

The real Lolita has always been hard to see, even if Humbert Humbert, Lolita’s narrator, presents her as his passionate focus from his first word: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” to his last, “the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita”. She has been buried under a mountain of misconstruction, to which Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World has added another flank, though certainly no new peak.

Lolita’s fate has been dramatic from the first. Overwhelmed by the challenge of writing from the point of view of a paedophile he abhorred, and about a young American girl when he knew none firsthand, Vladimir Nabokov twice took his manuscript towards the incinerator. His famously devoted wife, Véra, had to counsel him out of jettisoning what he later called “my most difficult book”.

On its 1958 publication in the US, Lolita became the fastest seller since Gone with the Wind, and went on to sell more than 60 million copies in dozens of languages – including Russian, into which Nabokov himself translated it. The novel was first published, in English, in Paris, in 1955, after Nabokov, despite his literary renown, could find no US publisher ready to touch it. And, despite France’s reputation for sexual openness in fiction, its English edition was banned there in 1956, unbanned after a court challenge, then re-banned in the month the American version topped the US bestseller lists (it was also banned in New Zealand, in 1959).

In 1999, Lolita was voted the greatest novel of the 20th century by American editors and critics, but because the poll was organised by the Modern Library, the American publisher of Ulysses, the results were fudged so as to hide that Ulysses had not won.