Introduction to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita/Publication history

Writing Lolita was a long and exhausting process for Vladimir Nabokov. As he admitted himself, “the first little throb of Lolita went through [him] late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris”. The process of writing the novel still continued in the summer of 1953 “at a ranch near Portal, Arizona, at a rented house in Ashland, Oregon, and at various motels in the West and Midwest”. Vladimir Nabokov finished writing the book on 6 December 1953 and in the spring of 1954 he began searching for a publisher.

Nabokov admitted that Lolita was the most challenging novel for him to write. The writer used to describe Lolita's creation as “a painful birth, a difficult baby” and the book itself as a “time bomb” as he already knew it would arouse great controversy. He was fully aware that he should treat the manuscript with great care, thus it was left unsigned and delivered secretly to publishers only by hand (according to Comstock Laws it was illegal to send erotica via American post). Although he was advised to bring out Lolita anonymously because of its controversial subject matter of paedophilia, he decided to sign Lolita with his name. Initially, he considered publishing Lolita under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert or an anagrammatic false female name - Vivian Darkbloom.

At first, Nabokov turned with Lolita to Viking Press and Simon & Schuster respectively, but he met only with refusal: Pascal Avram Covici from Viking Press, the first publisher to read the book, strongly advised Nabokov against releasing it since he claimed that publishing anonymously such a book was equal with asking for a trial (Schiff 2005: 238); Wallace Brockway from Simon & Schuster admitted that all his employees saw in Lolita nothing but pornography. In 1954 Nabokov resolved to hire a literary agent who would help him with publishing Lolita overseas. Nevertheless, the writer persevered in attempts to publish Lolita in the USA and offered the novel to New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. Again, all publishers turned Lolita down either deeming it pornography or fearing the aftermath of its release. As Lawrence L. Lee in his book Vladimir Nabokov accurately pointed out, Lolita was a book “about America that could not, apparently, be published in the States because it was too ‘perverse’” but it was “Lolita’s perversity, not its picture of America or its brilliance” that made it bestseller in the States. After American warnings and refusals, Doussia Ergaz (Nabokov's agent) helped him to reach Maurice Girodias, the founder of Olympia Press. The author knew that Olympia Press, the Paris-based publisher, had been distributing books not allowed in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, he was unaware that Olympia Press was mainly known for the publication of pornography and hastily signed a contract with Girodias for Lolita’s release. In September 1955 the book written in English was released in France; Nabokov received first copies of Lolita on 8 October 1955.

Initially, Lolita was not reviewed by significant magazines since it was put out by a small publisher in about only 5,000 copies. It was not until the very end of 1955 when Graham Greene in The Sunday Times of London called Nabokov’s book one of the three best novels of the year.

Reviewers’ polemic, bans, and scandalous subject matter created much hype on the novel. Great controversy centred on Nabokov’s Lolita generated growing demand for the book in the United States where it was finnally published on 18 August 1958 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. In Britain, Lolita was for the first time published in 1959 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.