Banned Books: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
When it was first published, Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial classic Lolita
was banned in a long list of countries, including France, Belgium, and Argentina. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher for his novel about divorced scholar Humbert Humbert’s sexual obsession for a 12-year-old ‘nymphet’ named Dolores Haze. After two years of rejections, in 1955 Nabokov eventually resorted to Olympia Press, a Parisian publisher of erotica which four years later gained further infamy after becoming the first publisher willing to bring William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch
to the masses.
Moral outrage and panic surrounded the publication of Lolita, with British Customs officers being ordered by the Home Office to seize and destroy any copies of the book found entering the UK. Bizarrely, in America Lolita was published with some trepidation but no significant hiccups, and sold more than 100,000 copies within the first three weeks, the first book to do so since Gone with the Wind
. Lolita was eventually released in the UK in 1959 to controversy but subsequent critical acclaim, and has since become the subject of many a textbook, essay and dissertation. Two film adaptations have been released, in 1962 and 1997, by Stanley Kubrick
and Adrian Lyne
, and knee socks and heart-shaped sunglasses soon became forever associated with seductive teenage nymphets.
Lolita is thankfully no longer banned, and is available as part of the Penguin Classics series. For an insight into the thousands of references, allusions and innuendoes that went straight over my head the first time I read it, might I also recommend The Annotated Lolita, by Alfred Appel? It’s £9.25, from Amazon
.
Post by Jane Bradley
