The novel was written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. (where Nabokov lived) and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is interrupted by Annabel's premature death from typhus, which causes Humbert to become sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as "nymphets".
After graduation, Humbert works as a teacher of French literature and begins editing an academic literary textbook, making passing references to repeated stays in mental institutions at this time.
Shocked and humiliated, Charlotte announces her plan to leave, taking Dolores with her, having already written a number of letters to her friends warning them of Humbert.
Disbelieving his false assurance that the diary is only a sketch for a future novel, Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is hit and killed by a swerving car.
As he waits for the pill to take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a mysterious man who seems to be aware of Humbert's plan for Dolores.
Humbert increasingly displays signs of paranoia and mania, perhaps caused by his growing certainty that he and Dolores are being trailed by someone who wants to separate them.
Shortly afterward, Humbert is arrested, and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and asks for his memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death.
Lolita is frequently described as an "erotic novel", not only by some critics but also in a standard reference work on literature, Facts on File: Companion to the American Short Story.
Malcolm Bradbury writes that "at first famous as an erotic novel, Lolita soon won its way as a literary one—a late modernist distillation of the whole crucial mythology.
The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser-used "faunlet".
"[13]: 158 Nabokov, who famously decried social satire, novels with direct political messages, and those he considered "moralists", avoided providing any overt interpretations to his work.
[20] Elizabeth Janeway, writing in The New York Times Book Review, holds: "Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.
[30] In Japan, the novel gave rise in the early 1980s to lolicon, a genre of fictional media in which young (or young-looking) girl characters appear in romantic or sexual contexts.
[32]: 55–56 Booth places Humbert in a literary tradition of unreliable narrators that is "full of traps for the unsuspecting reader, some of them not particularly harmful but some of them crippling or even fatal".
[33]: 371–372 For Booth, one of Lolita's main appeals is "watching Humbert almost make a case for himself" as Nabokov gives him "full and unlimited control of the rhetorical resources".
[35]: 223 Phelan addresses this problem of the relation between technique and ethics in Lolita by attempting to account for "two especially notable groups of readers": "those who are taken in by Humbert's artful narration" and those who resist "all of his rhetorical appeals".
[31]: 94–85 While superficially allied in his artistic aims with Nabokov's "espousal of esthetic bliss as the foremost criterion in the novel,"[31]: 92 Humbert separates himself with his contradictory depictions of himself and Lolita as literary constructs.
[31]: 93 Riggan sees Humbert as personifying "the spirit of Harlequin or a sottie clown who annihilates reality, turns life into a game and the world upside down, and ends by creating chaos".
[44] This statement provoked a response from the London Sunday Express, whose editor John Gordon called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography".
[53] The novel continues to generate controversy today as modern society has become increasingly aware of the lasting damage created by child sexual abuse.
[57] Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd denies that it was rape "in any ordinary sense", on the grounds that "it is she who suggests that they try out the naughty trick" which she has already learned at summer camp.
"[60] In 2020, a podcast hosted by Jamie Loftus set out to examine the cultural legacy of the novel, and argued that depictions and adaptations have "twisted" Nabokov's original intention of condemning Humbert in Lolita.
[61][62] In 1928, Nabokov wrote a poem named "Lilith" (Лилит), depicting a sexually attractive underage girl who seduces the male protagonist only to leave him humiliated in public.
It bears many similarities to Lolita, but also has significant differences: it takes place in Central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide.
[67] Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea,[68] drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's work.
Graham Vickers in his book Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again argues that the two major real-world predecessors of Humbert are Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin.
[80] Nabokov adds that "the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.
Of course she completely eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this.