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Awe and exhiliration—along with heartbreak
and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, Nabokov’s
most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story
of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed
passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also
the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the
cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is
a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination,
madness and transformation.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St.
Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. After studying French and Russian
literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, he launched his
literary career in Berlin and Paris. In 1940 he moved to the
United States, here he achieved renown as a novelist, poet,
critic, and translator. Lolita, arguably his most
famous novel, was first published, by the Olympia Press, Paris,
on September 15, 1955, and became a controversial success.
Nabokov died in Montreux Switzerland in 1977.
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