On August 18, 1958, Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel – "Lolita" was published in the United States. An interesting fact is that the work was written in English and first published in 1955 in Paris, and then translated by the author into Russian and published in 1958 in New York.
The work quickly gained worldwide fame for its innovative style and infamy for its plot. The narrator and protagonist, Humbert Humbert, begins to experience sexual attraction to 12-year-old Dolores Hayes (one of the pet names for whom Lolita is named).
After its publication, “Lolita“ became one of the most famous and controversial examples of 20th-century literature. The term “Lolita“ entered popular culture as a description of a precociously sexually developed young girl. The novel was adapted into films twice - in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, starring James Mason as Humbert and Sue Lyon as Lolita, and in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons and Dominic Swain.
”Time” magazine included the novel in its ranking of “100 best novels in English from 1923 to 2005“.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov himself was a prose writer, poet, playwright and literary critic. He was born on April 22/23, 1899 in St. Petersburg into a noble and wealthy family. In the eventful year of 1917, his father was briefly a minister in the Kerensky government.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, the Nabokovs were forced to emigrate. In 1919, Vladimir Vladimirovich entered the University of Cambridge and graduated in 1922. In March of that year, in Berlin, during an assassination attempt on the leader of the Cadet Party, Pavel Milyukov, Nabokov's father, who had covered Milyukov from a monarchist bullet, died. He spent the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin, then fled to Paris with his wife, the Jewess Vera Slonim, and their son Dmitri, and in In 1940 they moved to the USA.
He published many novels, among which the most famous are "Invitation to Execution", "Mashenka", "Protection of Luzhin" written in Russian, and the most famous are "Lolita", "Sign of Illegitimacy", "Pnin" and the memoir "Memory Speaks" (known in Bulgarian as "Other Shores"). He translated "Eugene Onegin" and "A Hero of Our Time" into English. In 1961 he settled with his wife in Switzerland. Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, on 78 years old, in Lausanne.