From the Publisher
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)When it was published in 1955,
Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the
freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic
predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov''s wise,
ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the
twentieth century''s novels of record not to the controversy its
material aroused but to its author''s use of that material to tell
a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and
exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this
account of the aging Humbert Humbert''s obsessive, devouring, and
doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the
story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful
barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation
on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and
transformation.With an Introduction by Martin Amis
From the Jacket
With an Introduction by Martin Amis
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause
celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it
handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But
Vladimir Nabokov''s wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its
stature as one of the twentieth century''s novels of record not to
the controversy its material aroused but to its author''s use of
that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty
and tenderness.
Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound
in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert''s obsessive,
devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita
is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the
cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a
meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and
transformation.
About the Author
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St.
Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture
and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an
outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the
opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik
revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was
shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to
shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was
already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine,
Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he
studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge,
taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he
lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under
the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations,
lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword
puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he
had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee
once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the
United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell.
He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in
English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private
tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody''s
concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled,
rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand
of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-the baffling mirror,
the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and
traditions-which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can
magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317]
Yet Nabokov''s American period saw the creation of what are
arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947),
Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale
Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian
novels into English. He also undertook English translations of
works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of
criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
Hardcover
376 Pages, 5.22 x 8.29 x 1.16 IN
March 9, 1993
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
English
0679410430
9780679410430