http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4846479[2]
50 Years Later, 'Lolita' Still Seduces Readers
NPR, D.C. - 2 hours
ago
That's the opening line of VLADIMIR NABOKOV\'S groundbreaking novel
Lolita -- the story of a 37-year-old man's emotional and sexual love
affair with a 12-year ...
[3] Authors
50 YEARS LATER,
\'LOLITA\' STILL SEDUCES READERS
by Madeleine Brand[4]Audio for this
story will be available at
approx. 3:00 p.m. ET
Sue Lyon as the
title character in Stanley Kubrick's 1961 film
version of _Lolita_, with a
screenplay written by Nabokov. Warner
Bros. © 2001
* VIDEO:
Humbert Humbert first meets Lolita in a classic scene from
the Stanley
Kubrick film.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection
Vladimir Nabokov
in Rome in 1959, after _Lolita_ made him an
international celebrity.
CORBIS © 2005
* WEB EXTRA: Nabokov reads the central poem from
_Lolita_ to a rapt
audience, April 1964.
Hulton-Deutsch
Collection
Customers in a London bookstore with copies of _Lolita_
after its
1959 release in Great Britain. CORBIS © 2005
AN AUDIO
\'LOLITA\'
Hear actor Jeremy Irons read from the unabridged, 10-CD
Random House
audio version of Nabokov's book:
* It begins:
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.'
* ...and it comes to an end:
'This then is my story.'
Day to Day[5], September 14, 2005 ·
"Lolita, light of my life, fire
of my loins. My sin, my
soul."
That's the opening line of Vladimir Nabokov's
groundbreaking novel
_Lolita_ -- the story of a 37-year-old man's
emotional and sexual
love affair with a 12-year-old girl.
When
the book was first published 50 years ago, it was considered by
some to be
obscene, to others a masterpiece of fiction. Over the
course of five
decades, the "masterpiece" vote has won out, more or
less -- but
even two generations later, there's still a lot of
debate.
Fans
of the book say the racy nature of the plot is secondary to the
true art
of the words. It's written in the voice of a man driven to
murder by his
urge to love and control the young girl. Nabokov's
prose alone can seduce
readers into seeing the man's otherwise
outrageous and criminal point of
view.
Nabokov, who fled persecution in Russia and in Nazi Europe,
was a
professor of Russian literature at Cornell University in Ithaca,
N.Y.
when he wrote _Lolita_, and many of the places described in the
book
are easily recognizable by residents today.
The author did
tremendous amount of research to get the details of
American life right.
"He would do things like travel on the buses
around Ithaca and record
phrases, in a little notebook, from young
girls that he heard coming back
from school," says Nabokov biographer
Brian Boyd.
The germ
of _Lolita_ was created in 1939 -- a short story, in
Russian, about a man
who marries a woman to get to her daughter. It
was not well received, but
the idea never left him. And a decade
later, Nabokov took up the story
again in America. And again, some of
his friends were horrified.
The book was rejected by five American publishers, afraid they'd be
prosecuted on obscenity charges. It was first published in France by
Olympia Press, which put out some serious books and lots of
pornography.
Nabokov didn't know that -- he was just relieved
someone agreed to
publish his book. And so _Lolita_ debuted, clad in a
plain green
cover, in Paris, on Sept. 15, 1955. It was published in
America three
years later and was an immediate hit.
Within a
year after the U.S. debut of _Lolita_, Nabokov left
Cornell. He had earned
enough money from the book that he could
afford to stop teaching and write
full time, and he spent the rest of
his life in Montreux, Switzerland.
_Lolita_ has so far sold 50 million
copies, and has been translated into
dozens of languages.
RELATED NPR STORIES
* April 25,
2004Possible Source for Nabokov's 'Lolita'
* April 23, 1999Vladmir
Nabokov
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