Lolita Study Guide

Vladimir Nabokov was born into an aristocratic St. Petersburg family during the last decades of the Russian Empire. He was raised to speak, read and write in Russian, French, and English. His father was a Liberal politician and former Minister of Justice under the Tsar. The Nabokovs were forced to leave Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. They fled to England, and then to Berlin, where they joined the burgeoning community of Russian émigrés. Vladimir studied zoology and literature at Cambridge University before returning to his family in Berlin. In 1922, Nabokov’s father was killed by an assassin, whose real target was another man. Forty years later, the incident would figure in Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire.

In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the United States reached a pinnacle of military power, economic prosperity, and cultural influence. American cars, Hollywood films, popular music, consumer products and fashion swept across Europe. The country was rapidly suburbanizing, and a middle class swelled by the G.I. bill and the booming economy aspired to new ideals of leisure and domesticity. The racial tensions and cultural upheavals of the 1960s had not yet manifested, and many cultural critics of the time believed that a new age of mass-media and conformity had arrived. Lolita satirizes, but also celebrates the culture of this era, epitomized by the clothes, crazes and interests of Lolita herself. Humbert Humbert views America skeptically, sometimes contemptuously, but usually with fascination.

Nabokov’s work affected an entire generation of writers in the United States and England. The energy and excess of detail in his prose, the puzzle-like complexity of his narratives, and his irrepressible love of wordplay exerted a major influence on American and British literature. Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Martin Amis are among the writers most influenced by Vladimir Nabokov’s work.