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August 6, Wednesday — "Next day" Humbert sees a doctor to get a prescription for sleeping pills p. While he is away, Charlotte reads his diary. When he comes home, she runs out and dies in a car accident p. When Humbert writes about "the fifty days of our cohabitation" p. It lasted from June 26 to August 6. That is only 42 days or exactly six weeks. He omits her funeral altogether and does not give the date. As he is eager to get away as early as possible but cannot go before Charlotte's funeral, this probably took place shortly before his actual departure, that is on August 11 or August 13, Wednesday — Humbert states that he left Ramsdale on a Wednesday p.
This must be the Wednesday after Charlotte's death, i. However, he also writes that he leaves "the house where I had rented a room only ten weeks before" p. As he had moved in at the end of May, this would set his departure around August 6. So he is wrong again. He writes "this must have been around August 15, " p.
Note the date he gives is only an approximate one. The real date is August His memory is making the span between Charlotte's death and his departure from Ramsdale longer than it was. Reckons a four hour drive to Briceland p. Actually arrives at "dusk" and checks in at the 'Enchanted Hunters' p. August 15, Friday — Late next morning they leave Briceland for Lepingville where they arrive after a leisurely drive the same day; on the way, Humbert tells Lolita that her mother is dead p.
At Lepingville, "our extensive travels all over the states began" p. Winter — "… straggled through southern deserts where we wintered" p. August — "… that extravagant year , August to August …" p. December — Interview with Ms. Pratt "one Monday forenoon, in December" p.
Christmas — Lolita has bronchitis "around Christmas" p. Spring — "By the time spring had touched up Thayer Street …, Lolita was irrevocably stage-struck" p. May — Lolita attending play rehearsals and piano lessons p. May 24, Tuesday — Lolita misses her piano lesson p. May 27, Friday — "One Friday night toward the end of May" Miss Emperor, Lolita's piano teacher, calls to ask "if Lo was coming next Tuesday because she had missed last Tuesday's and today's lessons" p. Humbert has a terrific row with Lo, hurts her, she runs away on her bicycle, he runs after her and finds her in a telephone booth p.
She appears pacified and suggests they "leave at once" p. From the fact that they do leave on Sunday, May 29, the dates of Miss Emperor's phone call and of Lolita's missed piano lessons can be inferred. May 29 — Humbert and Lolita leave for their second trip west one "pale but warm Sunday morning" p.
The trip is planned ahead by Lolita and her secret adviser. That is, Lolita expects the whole trip to Elphinstone to take around 31 days 9 to Wace, as it turns out, and "at least three weeks" to Elphinstone. Counting back 31 days from June 27 takes us to May 26 as their departure date. As in fact they leave on May 29, either Lolita's estimate is not quite correct or they are three or four days ahead of schedule on their lap from Wace to Elphinstone. Next morning she is not feeling well and stays at the motel while Humbert goes shopping and visits a barbershop. When he returns, Lolita probably has had a visitor.
They continue, Humbert getting ever more jealous and desperate. As Kasbeam most likely is situated in Central Illinois, it is between and miles to the Continental Divide if they travel west in a straight line by way of Iowa and Nebraska. The distance to Elphinstone is said to be the same p. Humbert says they travelled leisurely and "made seldom more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day" p. That means the trip from Kasbeam to Wace will have taken seven days.
June 7 or 8 — A "grim night in a very foul cabin" p. June 8 or 9 — "… and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and on time we drove into Wace" p. Lolita's calculation "more than a week" must have meant nine or ten days. Between June 14 and 16 — Still in Wace, they "naturally drift" toward a summer theater "one fair mid-June evening" p. Next morning, 9am — They go to the Wace post office p.
You can find more information in our data protection declaration. Lolita, Nabokov's story of an aging European intellectual and a nymphet, has been accepted into the literary canon. Now a new scandal has emerged: When Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita was first published in 's, it was considered scandalous. So racy was his description of the love affair between an ageing European intellectual and a young American nymphet that U. In Nabokov was forced to turn to French publishers to distribute the book and it was three years before U. More than four decades later, the initial literary scandal has subsided, and Nabokov's novel, though still generally considered controversial, has become an accepted part of the modern literary canon.
But a German literary historian has once again set tongues a-wagging, stirring up another Nabokov-related literary scandal. In the March 19th edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung FAZ , a German daily, the essayist and scholar Michael Marr suggested Nabokov may have plagiarized the work of Heinz von Lichberg, a little-known German writer and journalist, whose version of Lolita was published in in a collection of essays entitled The Cursed Gioconda " Die Verfluchte Gioconda".
Michael Marr pointed out numerous striking similarities between the work of von Lichberg and Nabokov. Marr then went on to describe the "coincidences" and give his take on whether or not they add up to pure chance, literary borrowing, or outright plagiarism. Indeed, the two stories are similar. Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain appear in a scene from the movie, "Lolita," an adaptation of the classic novel by Vladimir Nabokov. First, and most notably, both feature a young girl named Lolita.
And both follow the love affair between her and an older man. And in both cases, the girl dies. What did Nabokov know? In the medium of film, her character is inevitably fleshed out somewhat from the cipher that she remains in the novel. Nonetheless, Kubrick actually omits the few vignettes in the novel in which Humbert's solipsistic bubble is burst and one catches glimpses of Lolita's personal misery. Susan Bordo writes, "Kubrick chose not to include any of the vignettes from the novel which bring Lolita's misery to the forefront, nudging Humbert's obsession temporarily off center-stage.
Nabokov's wife, Vera, insisted—rightly—on 'the pathos of Lolita's utter loneliness. In Kubrick's film, one good sobfest and dead mommy is forgotten. Humbert, to calm her down, has promised her a brand-new hi-fi and all the latest records. The same scene in the novel ends with Lolita sobbing, despite Humbert having plied her with gifts all day. Critic Greg Jenkins believes that Humbert is imbued with a fundamental likability in this film that he does not necessarily have in the novel. Humbert's two mental breakdowns leading to sanatorium stays before meeting Lolita are entirely omitted in the film, as are his earlier unsuccessful relationships with women his own age whom he refers to in the novel as "terrestrial women" through which he tried to stabilize himself.
His lifelong complexes around young girls are largely concealed in the film, and Lolita appears older than her novelistic counterpart, both leading Jenkins to comment "A story originally told from the edge of a moral abyss is fast moving toward safer ground. Jenkins notes that Humbert even seems a bit more dignified and restrained than other residents of Ramsdale, particularly Lolita's aggressive mother, in a way that invites the audience to sympathize with Humbert. Humbert is portrayed as someone urbane and sophisticated trapped in a provincial small town populated by slightly lecherous people, a refugee from Old World Europe in an especially crass part of the New World.
For example, Lolita's piano teacher comes across in the film as aggressive and predatory compared to which Humbert seems fairly restrained. Jenkins believes that in the film it is Quilty, not Humbert, who acts as the embodiment of evil. Because Humbert narrates the novel, his increased mental deterioration due to anxiety in the entire second half of the story is more obvious from the increasingly desperate tone of his narrative.
While the film shows Humbert's increasingly severe attempts to control Lolita, the novel shows more of Humbert's loss of self-control and stability. Jenkins also notes that some of Humbert's more brutal actions are omitted or changed from the film. For example, in the novel he threatens to send Lolita to a reformatory, while in the film he promises to never send her there. The film entirely omits the critical episode in Humbert's life in which at age 14 he was interrupted making love to young Annabel Leigh who shortly thereafter died, and consequently omits all indications that Humbert had a preoccupation with prepubescent girls prior to meeting Dolores Haze.
In the novel, Humbert gives his youthful amorous relationship with Annabel Leigh, thwarted by both adult intervention and her death, as the key to his obsession with nymphets. The film's only mention of "nymphets" is an entry in Humbert's diary specifically revolving around Lolita. Humbert explains that the smell and taste of youth filled his desires throughout adulthood: The idea that anything connected with young girls motivated Humbert to accept the job as professor of French Literature at Beardsley College and move to Ramsdale at all is entirely omitted from the film.
In the novel he first finds accommodations with the McCoo family. He accepts the professorship because the McCoos have a twelve-year-old daughter, a potential "enigmatic nymphet whom [he] would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Haze offers to accommodate Humbert.
Susan Bordo has noticed that in order to show the callous and cruel side of Humbert's personality early in the film, Nabokov and Kubrick have shown additional ways in which Humbert behaves monstrously towards her mother, Charlotte Haze. He mocks her declaration of love towards him, and takes a pleasant bath after her accidental death. This effectively replaces the voice-overs in which he discusses his plans to seduce and molest Lolita as a means of establishing Humbert as manipulative, scheming, and selfish.
Quilty's role is greatly magnified in the film and brought into the foreground of the narrative. In the novel Humbert catches only brief uncomprehending glimpses of his nemesis before their final confrontation at Quilty's home, and the reader finds out about Quilty late in the narrative along with Humbert. Quilty's role in the story is made fully explicit from the beginning of the film, rather than being a concealed surprise twist near the end of the tale. In a interview with Terry Southern , Kubrick describes his decision to expand Quilty's role, saying "just beneath the surface of the story was this strong secondary narrative thread possible—because after Humbert seduces her in the motel, or rather after she seduces him, the big question has been answered—so it was good to have this narrative of mystery continuing after the seduction.
The film opens with a scene near the end of the story, Humbert's murder of Quilty. This means that the film shows Humbert as a murderer before showing us Humbert as a seducer of minors, and the film sets up the viewer to frame the following flashback as an explanation for the murder. The film then goes back to Humbert's first meeting with Charlotte Haze and continues chronologically until the final murder scene is presented once again. The book, narrated by Humbert, presents events in chronological order from the very beginning, opening with Humbert's life as a child.
While Humbert hints throughout the novel that he has committed murder, its actual circumstances are not described until near the very end. In the novel, Miss Pratt, the school principal at Beardsley, discusses with Humbert Dolores's behavioral issues and among other things persuades Humbert to allow her to participate in the dramatics group, especially one upcoming play. In the film, this role is replaced by Quilty disguised as a school psychologist named "Dr.
This disguise does not appear in the novel at all.
In both versions, a claim is made that Lolita appears to be "sexually repressed", as she mysteriously has no interest in boys. Zempf and Miss Pratt express the opinion that this aspect of her youth should be developed and stimulated by dating and participating in the school's social activities.
While Pratt mostly wants Humbert to let Dolores generally into the dramatic group, Quilty as Zempf is specifically focused on the high school play written by Quilty and produced with some supervision from him which Lolita had secretly rehearsed for in both the film and novel. Although Peter Sellers is playing only one character in this film, Quilty's disguise as Dr. Zempf allows him to employ a mock German accent that is quintessentially in the style of Sellers's acting. With regard to this scene, playwright Edward Albee 's stage adaptation of the novel follows Kubrick's film rather than the novel.
The movie retains the novel's theme of Quilty anonymously goading Humbert's conscience on many occasions, though the details of how this theme is played out are quite different in the film. He has been described as "an emanation of Humbert's guilty conscience", [32] and Humbert describes Quilty in the novel as his "shadow". The first and last word of the novel is "Lolita". In the novel, Humbert and Charlotte go swimming in Hourglass Lake, where Charlotte announces she will ship Lo off to a good boarding school; that part takes place in bed in the film.
Humbert's contemplation of possibly killing Charlotte similarly takes place at Hourglass Lake in the book, but at home in the film. This difference affects Humbert's contemplated method of killing Charlotte. In the book he is tempted to drown her in the lake, whereas in the film he considers the possibility of shooting her with a pistol while in the house, in both scenarios concluding that he could never bring himself to do it.
In his biography of Kubrick, Vincent LoBrutto notes that Kubrick tried to recreate Hourglass Lake in a studio, but became uncomfortable shooting such a pivotally important exterior scene in the studio, so he refashioned the scene to take place at home. In the novel Humbert really considers killing Charlotte and later Lolita accuses Humbert of having deliberately killed her.
Only the first scene is in the film and only the latter scene appears in the film. Lolita's friend, Mona Dahl, is a friend in Ramsdale the first half of the story in the film and disappears quite early in the story. In the film, Mona is simply the host of a party which Lolita abandons early in the story.
Mona is a friend of Lolita's in Beardsley the second half of the story in the novel. In the novel Mona is active in the school play, Lolita tells Humbert stories about Mona's love life, and Humbert notes Mona had "long since ceased" to be if ever she was a "nymphet. She keeps Lolita's secrets and helps Lolita lie to Humbert when Humbert discovers that Lolita has been missing her piano lessons. In the film, Mona in the second half seems to have been replaced by a "Michele" who is also in the play and having an affair with a Marine and backs up Lolita's fibs to Humbert.
Film critic Greg Jenkins claims that Mona has simply been entirely eliminated from the film. Humbert is suspicious that Lolita is developing an interest in boys at various times throughout the story. He suspects no one in particular in the novel.
A Plagiarism" in Harper's Magazine on this story. As he waits for the pill to take effect he wanders through the hotel and meets an anonymous man who, he does not know, is in fact famous playwright Clare Quilty, a friend of the now-deceased Charlotte. Humbert uses the interaction to bring himself to ejaculate, which Dolores does not apparently notice. The art of training and riding horses. Fast fashion churns environmental destruction as fast as seasonal trends. Quotes [ first lines ] Humbert Humbert:
In the film, he is twice suspicious of a pair of boys, Rex and Roy, who hang out with Lolita and her friend Michele. In the novel, Mona has a friend named Roy. In the novel, the first mutual attraction between Humbert and Lolita begins because Humbert resembles a celebrity she likes.
In the film, it occurs at a drive-in horror film when she grabs his hand. Christine Lee Gengaro proposes that this suggests that Humbert is a monster in a mask, [39] and the same theory is developed at greater length by Jason Lee.
In the novel, both the hotel at which Humbert and Dolores first have relations and the stage-play by Quilty for which Dolores prepares to perform in at her high school is called The Enchanted Hunter. However, in the novel school headmistress Pratt erroneously refers to the play as The Hunted Enchanter. In Kubrick's film, the hotel bears the same name as in the novel, but now the play really is called The Hunted Enchanter. Both names are established only through signage — the banner for the police convention at the hotel and the marquee for the play — the names are never mentioned in dialogue.
The relationships between Humbert and other women before and after Lolita is omitted from the film.
Greg Jenkins sees this as part of Kubrick's general tendency to simplify his narratives, also noting that the novel therefore gives us a more "seasoned" view of Humbert's taste in women.