To browse Academia. Lolita, his twelfth novel, was published in , and has become a classic of contemporary literature. Two movies were made from it. The first one, filmed in , was directed by Stanley Kubrick and shot in eighty-eight days. The second one was directed by Adrian Lyne in 1.
Stephen Schiff's screen-pay follows the novel closely: on the very first scene, we hear the main character's voice, as he savors his memories of Lolita, and declares his love for her: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul". Which of the two film versions is the most faithful to the spirit of Nabokov's original work is hard to tell.
Whereas in the former one we dive deep into a typically Nabokovian atmosphere of parody, which reaches the point of pastiche in Peter Seller's performance, in Adrian Lyne's film, the tragic dimension swallows up the comic aspect, and we find ourselves inadvertently sympathizing with Humbert Humbert, who is being tried for murder, and we are stripped of the opportunity of feeling somewhat insulted by his irony and his cruelty, as we do when reading the book.
However, Lyne is better at depicting the anguish and the splittings inserted by Nabokov into Humbert's reverie. Lolita is a deceptive text that has been putting readers on trial ever since its publication in by the ill-famed Olympia Press. Humbert's erudition manifests itself in the numerous literary allusions he scatters throughout his text. They have been noticed by Nabokov's earliest critics, but little has been said about the corresp ondences between them and the patterns they form.
In other words, he is trying to persuade his readers that he truly regrets having ruined Lolita's childhood, but he also wants to make them condone his immorality. The allusions serve particular authorial purposes; they posit the book as texture and intimate themes, thereby revealing the "secret points, the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is plotted" as Nabokov expresses it in a postscript to the novel, ' On a Book Entitled Lolita ' p.
