Classic ‘Lolita’ gets a special edition for its 50th anniversary

Lolita was 12 when Vladimir Nabokov brought her to life as the obsession of her stepfather, a middle-aged man who calls her “light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin. My soul.... Lo. Lee. Ta.”

After three generations, readers remain relentlessly drawn to Nabokov’s opening lines -- more poetry than prose. They remain equally repelled by Humbert Humbert, a child molester who essentially held his stepdaughter captive; he is as despicable today as he was in 1955.

“Lolita,” a deceptively thin volume, has sold 50 million copies. Vintage Books already has sold all 50,000 copies of a 50th anniversary edition it released this month.

A close-up of a young woman’s mouth replaces the previous cover photograph, a black-and-white photograph of a girl’s legs, in ankle socks and saddle shoes.

“Lolita” and “nymphet” -- another word Nabokov coined -- have worked their way into the lexicon. Two movie versions, first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, starring James Mason, and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997, starring Jeremy Irons, have coaxed millions into theaters. Iranian author Azar Nafisi penned her own contemporary bestseller, “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” inspired in part by her teaching of Nabokov, and the “Gothic Lolita” is all the rage among teenage fans of Japanese anime.

How is it that a pedophile protagonist remains sympathetic enough to draw audiences? Why does this backward fairy tale -- Prince Charming as a monster -- endure?

Literary critics say the explanation is simple: art.

“No one respected language more than Nabokov,” said Stephen Parker, a student of the author’s at Cornell University in the late 1950s who founded the Nabokov Society at the University of Kansas. “You don’t read it for his ideas; you read it for his presentation.”

Parker says the Russian-born Nabokov, who made his fortune with “Lolita,” was less concerned about teaching a lesson in morality than he was in creating a long-lasting work of art.

“Get beyond the story, the entertainment and get into what was more important,” Parker said. “That’s the case with ‘Lolita.’ The reason it’s such a great work is because it has such great depth.... It’s endlessly revealing. And that’s what the finest fiction should be.”

In December 1953, Nabokov delivered the 450-page manuscript to Viking Press in New York. He was told it was brilliant but that any publisher who accepted it risked being fined or jailed. Rejections from five U.S. publishers followed.

Then “Lolita” made its way to Paris, to Maurice Girodias, founder and owner of Olympia Press. Girodias’ father had published Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn” in the 1930s. Following in his father’s footsteps and eager to make money, Girodias published English-language pornography, books that had been censored elsewhere.

“Lolita” came out in Paris in September 1955. Almost no one took notice at first; it was neither reviewed nor advertised until novelist Graham Greene named it one of the three best books of 1955 in the Christmas issue of London’s Sunday Times.