Lolita at 70: Rereading Nabokov’s scandalous novel in era of #MeToo and Epstein

When Lolita finally appeared in Paris in 1955, it came from Olympia Press, a publisher notorious for erotica. The response was immediate and divided, thereby, evoking tremendous public interest. While the Sunday Express condemned it as “sheer unrestrained pornography,” American literary critic and writer Dorothy Parker writing for Esquire wrote: “I cannot regard it as pornography, either sheer, unrestrained, or any other kind. It is the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls.”

Parker found the novel “wildly funny.” [Nabokov’s] command of the language is absolute, and his Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—alright then—a great book,” she wrote.

Upon its release in 1955, France became the first of several nations to ban Lolita, with Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia soon following suit—Australian censors even barred the book until 1965. In the United Kingdom, a fierce debate in Parliament led to customs confiscating all copies until its eventual publication in 1959. The backlash was so intense that its publisher, Conservative MP Nigel Nicolson, was compelled to resign from his position.

Still from Lolita (1962). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Production Design by William C. Andrews. (Source: film-grab.com)

When Jawaharlal Nehru read Lolita 

In India, the novel stirred a remarkable episode. In 1959, a consignment of Lolita imported by Jaico Publishing House was seized by Bombay Customs as potentially obscene. The debate quickly escalated to the highest levels of government, reaching Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Finance Minister Morarji Desai called the book “sex perversion” and favored a ban, but Nehru read the novel himself before deciding. Lolita, he wrote, was “a serious book, seriously written … certainly not pornographic in the normal sense of the word.” With the support of Vice President S Radhakrishnan, Nehru ordered the release of the seized copies, refusing to censor a novel he deemed to have literary merit. By 1959, when it reached Britain and the United States, Lolita was both a bestseller and a cultural flashpoint.

In a 1964 Playboy article, Nabokov reflected: “I shall never regret Lolita … she 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.”

A book that refuses to disappear

More than six decades after its American debut, Lolita still provokes fierce debate. In 2021, Jenny Minton Quigley, the daughter of Walter J Minton, the publisher who, in 1958, brought Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous novel to the United States, brought out an anthology Lolita in the Afterlife, where she assembles novelists, critics and artists to consider whether Nabokov’s most infamous creation can withstand the scrutiny of the #MeToo era.

The responses are strikingly divergent. Roxane Gay, the novelist and essayist known for Bad Feminist, calls Nabokov “a tricky bastard.”

“He never loses sight of his craft; he tells a story that is at once simple and complex. He manipulates the reader throughout the novel in that his condemnation of and contempt for Humbert’s predilection are clear but he also manages to humanise someone who is, by any measure, a monster,” Gay writes.

Still from Lolita (1962). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Production Design by William C. Andrews. (Source: film-grab.com)

Mary Gaitskill, the author of Bad Behavior and Veronica, also feels the tension: “Truly, the darkness—the cruelty—of the story is not obscured but heightened by the beauty of the language through the force of artistic contrast, and that contrast is stunning, making the reader feel the wild, often terrible incongruity of human life on earth.” This dissonance, between horror and aesthetic brilliance, has always defined the novel.

Alexander Chee, whose How to Write an Autobiographical Novel has become a touchstone of contemporary literary memoir, describes his uneasy lifelong bond with Nabokov’s book.  Chee, reflecting in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, observes that Humbert’s crimes look almost small besides Jeffery Epstein’s world of wealth and impunity. Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” ferried politicians, celebrities, and academics to his private island in the Caribbean, where he trafficked underage girls. The plane’s nickname itself was a chilling admission of the cultural reach of Nabokov’s novel. Epstein, Chee argues, embodied Humbert’s obsessions on a monstrous scale, including his island, his sex dungeon, and his socialite fixer Ghislaine Maxwell echoing Nabokov’s fiction in ways that blur the line between grotesque fantasy and grim reality. In his words, Humbert seemed “an ordinary pig drunkenly bragging he is that rare pig with wings.”

But the terms of debate have shifted. The question is no longer simply whether Lolita should be censored, but whether readers can responsibly inhabit the mind of a predator. (Amazon Prime Video)

Would publishers dare today?

The modern publishing world is paradoxical. On one hand, in the 2023-2024 school year, PEN America counted more than 10,000 book bans in public schools, mostly targeting LGBTQ+ and racially diverse titles. On the other, novels that push against taboos still appear. Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb (2011), about a man’s unsettling relationship with an 11-year-old girl, was published by Penguin Random House with comparatively little uproar.

But the terms of debate have shifted. The question is no longer whether Lolita should be censored, but whether readers can responsibly inhabit the mind of a predator.

Scholar Trevor McNeely in his 1989 paper, “Lo and Behold: Solving the ‘Lolita’ Riddle” warned that praising Nabokov purely for his artistry risks sliding into dangerous rationalisations. To admire Humbert’s “poetic sensibility” without acknowledging his predation, he argued, is “at the very least a distortion, if not an outright lie.”

Literary critic and novelist Edmund White echoed this in 2020. White, best known for his novels on gay life and for his influential biographies, wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Nabokov’s job in the book is to make you like the monstrous Humbert Humbert. In the 1960s readers were too swinging to see how evil he was and now readers are too prudish to see how charming he can be.”

The reckoning continues

What keeps Lolita alive is its refusal to settle. It is satire, tragedy, confession, road novel, and also, inescapably, the story of a child’s exploitation. Gaitskill observes that it dramatises “the natural coexistence of beauty and destruction, goodness and predatory devouring, cruelty and tenderness, a world in which countless torturers’ horses scratch their “innocent behind[s]” on countless trees—is a core mystery of life. And that mystery is the true heart of Lolita.”

Would it be published today? Undoubtedly. Though with content warnings, controversy, and endless analysis. Critics against the book’s ban argue that Nabokov’s novel is not an apology but a provocation.

McNeely’s reading reinforces that view. He observed that Nabokov even deploys false analogies to justify Humbert’s obsession—comparing it to Dante’s love for Beatrice or Petrarch’s for Laura, analogies Nabokov knew were wholly unacceptable but strategically offered to seduce unwary readers. By parodying romantic archetypes Nabokov sharpened the novel’s trap: dazzling readers with beauty while revealing its monstrous core.

That reckoning is ongoing. Lolita has seeped into fashion ads, pop songs, and internet memes, often stripped of its darkness. Yet its endurance testifies to the unsettled questions it raises about art, morality, desire, and power. And so Nabokov’s “beautiful puzzle,” once nearly suppressed, continues to compel, horrify, and haunt.

Reference

Kaushik, Shubhneet. “When Jawaharlal Nehru Read ‘Lolita’ to Decide Whether an ‘Obscene’ Book Should Be Allowed in India.” Scroll.in, June 4, 2022. https://scroll.in/article/1024765/when-jawaharlal-nehru-read-lolita-to-decide-whether-an-obscene-book-should-be-allowed-in-india.

Library of America. “Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita First Published in the U.S. 52 Years Ago.” Library of America News & Views, October 31, 2017. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1055-vladimir-nabokov8217s-lolita-first-published-in-the-us-52-years-ago.

Quigley, Jenny Minton, ed. Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021.