17 Facts About Lolita

1.

Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

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2.

Lolita spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh.

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3.

Lolita then takes her to a high-end hotel that Charlotte had earlier recommended.

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4.

Lolita is frequently described as an "erotic novel", not only by some critics but in a standard reference work on literature, Facts on File: Companion to the American Short Story.

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5.

Lolita is characterized by irony and sarcasm; it is not an erotic novel.

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6.

For Richard Rorty, in his interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity".

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7.

Critics have further noted that, since the novel is a first person narrative by Humbert, the novel gives very little information about what Lolita is like as a person, that in effect she has been silenced by not being the book's narrator.

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8.

Lolita was published in September 1955, as a pair of green paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors".

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9.

Lolita was later translated into Russian by Nabokov himself and published in New York City in 1967 by Phaedra Publishers.

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10.

In Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire, the titular poem by fictional John Shade mentions Hurricane Lolita coming up the American east coast in 1958, and narrator Charles Kinbote notes it, questioning why anyone would have chosen an obscure Spanish nickname for a hurricane.

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11.

Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea, drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's work.

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12.

Lolita contains a few brief allusions in the text to the Alice books, though overall Nabokov avoided direct allusions to Carroll.

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13.

In chapter 29 of Part Two, Humbert comments that Lolita looks "like Botticelli's russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty, " referencing Sandro Botticelli's depiction of Venus in, perhaps, The Birth of Venus or Venus and Mars.

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14.

Lolita takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the preteen girl who lives in the same house.

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15.

Nothing of what we admire in Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter.

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16.

Lolita's was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.

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17.

Lolita has been adapted as two films, a musical, four stage-plays, one completed opera, and two ballets.

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