Lolitas

Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov rated the book highly. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962, he said:

    Lolita is a special favorite of mine. 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.

Over a year later, in an interview for Playboy, he said:

    I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. 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. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.

In the same year, in an interview with Life, Nabokov was asked which of his writings had most pleased him. He answered:

    I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

Lolita
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The Russian-born American novelist had wanted The Original of Laura to be destroyed when he died in 1977.

But after decades of deliberation his son, Dimitri Nabokov, has finally taken the decision to publish. He apparently did so because his father also wanted Lolita, his most well-known book, to be burned.

Alexis Kirschbaum, editor at Penguin Classics, bought the book and rights to continue publishing the Nabakov backlist in a six-figure deal, according to The Bookseller magazine.

The Original of Laura will be published as a Penguin Classics hardback on November 3, priced £25.

Kirschbaum said she and Stefan McGrath, the managing director of Penguin Classics, sealed the deal after a three-day stay at Dimitri Nabakov's home in Montreaux, Switzerland. It was brokered by Andrew Wylie, the New York-based literary agent known as 'The Jackal'.

Kirschbaum said: "It was important that we meet because it was a big acquisition, and it was quite emotional for Dimitri because it was a big decision to publish, which took him decades."

The Original of Laura returns to territory that Nabokov explored in his previous novels Mary, Lolita and Ada – the yearning to recapture young love.

It is narrated by a man who fell obsessively in love with a girl when young, but is now unhappily married to a promiscuous wife.

Kirschbaum, who described the book as both dark and comic, said: "In this novel he is also very interested in psychology and in what it means to hate yourself and want to disappear."

She said the book, which Nabokov wrote by hand on a series of 138 index cards, amounted to "a good chunk" of text that took "several hours" to read.

Penguin Classics will publish all the cards in the book, with a transcript of text on the opposite page.

Kirschbaum added: "I'm an avid, obsessed fan of Nabokov and for other fans it's incredibly interesting to see his handwriting and read his prose – not necessarily extremely polished, but you can still see kernels of genius in everything he wrote."

Penguin Classics intends to republish Nabokov's entire backlist, beginning this November with six of his novels that explore themes of childhood and young love.

Publication of a collection of Nabokov poems never before published in English is planned for November 2010, followed by a collection of previously unpublished letters to his wife Vera a year later.