"Lolita is an indictment...

...of all the things it expresses. It is a pathetic book dealing with the plight of a child, a very ordinary little girl, caught up by a disgusting and cruel man… But of all my books, I like it the best." - Vladimir Nabokov

[doloresdisparue]

Here's your unfriendly reminder that according to Nabokov THIS is what Lolita should have looked like.

This is what he was picturing, what you should be picturing reading the novel. What he wanted the movie to look like.

Is this still cute and sexy and #goals? Something to put in a little aesthetic post? To post along with #daddy #older men do it better?

Or are you being extremely weird about a novel chronicling horrific abuse inflicted on a young child (much of which was based on real events)?

[doloresliddell]

Despite popular belief, when they met Dolore was actually kneeling on a mat, not posing like a pin up model. She was wearing sunglasses, but not heart shaped.

She has a mole on her side.

[sumquiasum]

Reading Lolita is like "Hi my name is Humbert Humbert and I have soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor and a lot of people tell me I look like some crooner or actor chap a nymphet might have a crush on (AN: if u don’t know what that is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Edgar Allan Poe but I wish I was because he’s an icon. I have muscular hands, broad shoulders and a clean-cut jaw. I’m a European academic but I live in Ramsdale because my uncle died and I inherited his perfume business (I’m once-divorced). I’m a man of exceptional virility (in case you couldn’t tell) and I have the best taste. I hate all women because they’re ugly and they all want me. I was walking along the streets with my deep sonorous voice and my gloomy good looks. It was sunny so there were nymphets running around, which I was very happy about. A lot of old hags started at me. If I wasn’t such a great guy with impeccable manners I would have put up my middle finger at them."

[doloresdisparue]

lolita / the incest diary

[niffie08]

[thenotoriouscrb]

Happy Birthday to Dolores Haze!

Some biblically accurate fancasts for you.

(Mary Badham, Lindsay Lohan, and Aaron Johnson)

[niffie08]

my son daughter, the dolly 👧🌻

[niffie08]

Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita 1955

[doloresdisparue]

hello, assuming you know everything nabokavian. Is it true that he used to go to malls and eavesdrop on real children’s conversations and such and such to flesh out dolores’ character? (i can’t recollect the rest of what i remember hearing augh) if so, I’d like a source!

a very flattering assumption <3 yes, that is true and more than that! his index cards from the process of writing lolita have quotes from then-current teen magazines and movies which he consumed in his research too. he also (less fun) talked about how hard it was reading a lot of CSA related case histories which is probably why the depiction of dolores trauma turned out so incredibly realistic despite the lack of general public knowledge at the time. there are several sources talking about his process apart from the literal index card exhibition including but most likely not limited to:

I had written a short story with the same idea as Lolita. The man’s name there is Arthur. They travel through France. I never published it. The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little3 I managed to give her some semblance of reality. I was on my way to the incinerator one day with half the manuscript to burn it, and Véra said wait a minute. And I came back meekly. “I don’t remember that. Did I?” said Mrs. Nabokov. What was most difficult was putting myself….I am a normal man, you see. I traveled in school buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls. I went to school on the pretext of placing our daughter. We have no daughter. For Lolita I took one arm of a little girl who used to come to see Dmitri, one kneecap of another.

Vogue, Dec 1966 Interview with Penelope Gilliatt

Lolita, meanwhile, was still growing. Nabokov undertook research of all kinds. [...] he needed to know current schoolgirl slang. He traveled on buses, noting down in his diary snatches he overheard: "She's quite a kid," or "Listen, I met-" or "It's a sketch," "It's a riot," "It's a panic." [...] He visited a school principal on the pretext of placing his little daughter. He searched out recent studies of the physical and psychological development of American schoolgirls, recording on his index cards perti­nent details from such works as "Attitudes and Interests of Premenarchal and Postmenarchal Girls" and "Sexual Maturation and the Physical Growth of Girls Age Six to Nineteen." He noted newspaper reports of accidents, sex crimes, and killings: "a middle-aged morals offender" who abducted fifteen-year-old Sally Horner from New Jer­sey and kept her for twenty-one months as his "cross-country slave," until she was found in a southern California motel; G. Edward Gram­mar's ineptly staged murder of his wife in a poorly faked motor ac­cident; [...] He took song titles from juke­ boxes, and phrases from teen magazines, women's magazines, home decorating guides, billboards, motel guest notices, Girl Scout manuals, and more overheard conversation ("I have zillions of them," "She was loads of fun")

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years by Brian Boyd

[thenotoriouscrb]

RIP Sue Lyon you should've been allowed to beat James B. Harris to death with a rock

[thenotoriouscrb]

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

[doloresdisparue]

I have a confession to make. Even though "Lo's diary" was a completely bastardized adaptation of the original novel and Dolores is almost completely mischaracterized in every possible regard(why ms pera would turn a regular,slightly bratty preteen into a racist, animal abusing,self-obsessed,woman-hating,manipulative mastermind is simply beyond all rhyme and reason to me) a tiny part of me still relishes in the fact that she survived and managed to run away from Quilty and had her friend Nora(was that her name?can't remember.) as her support system.

No, I get that. That's one reason I treasure the musical so much (and you might too if this is important to you), because they made the conscious choice (I can attest to this because I talked to the creatives and cried on Zoom when they elaborated) to let her survive and have a future (and without making her torture hamsters).

BUT! You are in luck because having started at the bottom of the totem pole you have MORE options for Dolly-centric retellings, some of which let her survive and all of which have more compassion with her or her stand-in than Lo's Diary.

The girl survives: Bye Bye Lolita by Lea Ruckpaul, Roger Fishbite by Emily Prager, Gemma by Meg Tilly. (I count "My Dark Vanessa" among the Lolita adjacent novels because of how it engages with the text so I still recommend it but it is in all honesty a very different story with a different dynamic not a retelling)

The girl does not survive but is explored with love and genuine care by the author: Lolita Child by Kyleigh Archer, Molly by Nancy J Jones

I genuinely do not remember how Journal de L ends because translating it took all my brain power and can't check because I'm at the dentist right now 😅 But it was definitely better than Lo's diary.

[yakuza-yuki]

Anybody heard of this niche roadtrip novel by Nabokov

[yakuza-yuki]

what’s the point of the dance if the beat never drops, right?

[yakuza-yuki]

@n0t-lepidoptera mentioned Lo reading comics and immediately gave me a vision for my Spotify playlist cover.

[yakuza-yuki]

We should give her access to Coolmathgames I think

[kurouppy]

Sketchbook cover! Quote* is from Nabokov's Lolita, art is inspired by Aya Takano's work, especially this piece

*[It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.]