50 Fun Facts About Lolita

The narrator of Lolita keeps addressing his memoir to which imagined audience?

A jury. He appeals again and again to the 'ladies and gentlemen of the jury' for sympathy, yet the foreword reveals that he died in jail before any trial began.

Under what pseudonym does the narrator of Lolita write his memoir?

Humbert Humbert. Nabokov chose the double rumble as 'a hateful name for a hateful person', but also a kingly one, fit for 'Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble'.

What is the real name of the girl the narrator calls 'Lolita'?

Dolores Haze. Lolita is a Spanish pet form of Dolores that only the narrator uses; to her mother and everyone else she is Lo, Lola or Dolly.

What is the 12-year-old girl doing when the narrator of Lolita first sees her?

Sunbathing. He had already made up his mind not to rent the room; one glimpse of her, the image of his lost childhood sweetheart, and he moved in.

What subject does the narrator of Lolita teach and write textbooks about?

French literature. His textbook comparing French and English writers gives the memoir its excuse to drop in Flaubert, Proust, Baudelaire and Ronsard.

Lolita opens with a fictitious foreword by which invented editor of psychology books?

John Ray Jr. He primly presents the memoir as a case study and a warning, a reading Nabokov's own afterword rejects: the book, he says there, 'has no moral in tow'.

The narrator's teenage first love, Annabel Leigh, takes her name from a poem by which writer?

Edgar Allan Poe. His 'Annabel Lee' mourns a childhood love cut short by the girl's death, the same loss the narrator blames for everything that follows.

What did Nabokov originally intend to call Lolita?

The Kingdom by the Sea. He gave that title in a 1947 letter to the critic Edmund Wilson about a 'short novel' he had begun; it took him years more and outgrew both the length and the name.

In which fictional New England town does the narrator of Lolita lodge with the Haze family?

Ramsdale. He had arranged to board with another family, but their house burned down before he arrived, so he was passed on to the widow Haze's spare room.

How does Charlotte Haze die, moments after reading the narrator's diary in Lolita?

She is hit by a car. She was running to post letters exposing him; not long before, he had thought about drowning her in a lake and could not go through with it.

In Lolita, which famous playwright turns out to have taken the girl from the hospital in Elphinstone?

Clare Quilty. Posing as her uncle, he had been trailing the pair for weeks; the narrator later tracks him to his mansion and shoots him.

What is hidden in the Lolita character name Vivian Darkbloom?

The author, in anagram. Vivian Darkbloom rearranges Vladimir Nabokov, who expected to publish under a pseudonym and planted the name as a hidden signature; years later he signed his own notes to the novel Ada with it.

According to the foreword of Lolita, how does the title character die?

In childbirth. The foreword reports it under her married name, Mrs Richard F. Schiller, so a first-time reader passes over the news at the very start without knowing who she is.

Which old word did Lolita give a new meaning that most dictionaries now record?

Nymphet. It had meant a little nymph since the early 1600s; the narrator's use gave it the sense dictionaries list today, while his male counterpart, 'faunlet', never caught on.

Nabokov built up Lolita and his other novels by writing scenes in any order on what?

Index cards. He filled in the story 'a bit here and a bit there', numbered the cards only when the set was complete, and reckoned that about three of them made one typed page.

Who stopped Nabokov when he tried to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita?

His wife Véra. She pulled the pages back from the flames more than once; she was also his typist, driver and first reader, and every one of his books is dedicated to her.

Lolita was first published in 1955 in which city?

Paris. American publishers had turned it down for fear of an obscenity trial, so the first edition appeared abroad, in English, as two green paperbacks 'swarming with typographical errors'.

Which publisher, better known for erotica, issued the first edition of Lolita?

Olympia Press. Maurice Girodias made his money from cheap English-language erotica, yet the same list carried Samuel Beckett and was the first to print William Burroughs's Naked Lunch.

Which English novelist rescued Lolita by naming it a best book of 1955 in the Sunday Times?

Graham Greene. His pick provoked the editor of the Sunday Express into calling it 'the filthiest book I have ever read', and the quarrel made an obscure paperback famous.

Which novel knocked Lolita off the top of the US bestseller list in 1958?

Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak's novel took over in November after Lolita's seven weeks at number one; it had been refused publication at home and smuggled abroad to be printed.

Which country banned Lolita for two years from December 1956?

France. The ban came at London's urging, after British customs had begun seizing copies that travellers carried home, and it was lifted two years later.

Which American publisher finally issued Lolita in the United States in August 1958?

G. P. Putnam's Sons. The firm took the risk three years after the book had first appeared abroad, and was rewarded with a third printing inside four days.

Lolita was the first novel since which book to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks in the US?

Gone with the Wind. Within six weeks Lolita was number one in America, a sharp turn for a novel that American publishers had refused to touch.

The New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott called Lolita repulsive and, three times over, what?

Dull. 'Dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion', he wrote on publication day, yet the book was in its third printing within four days.

What did publishing Lolita in 1959 help to cost the publisher Nigel Nicolson?

His seat in Parliament. A Conservative MP, he was already in trouble with his local party over Suez; the Lolita row made it worse, and after losing a members' ballot he stood down at the 1959 election.

Nabokov said a newspaper story about which caged animal's first drawing gave him the 'initial shiver' for Lolita?

An ape. Coaxed for months by a scientist, he wrote, it produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal, and the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.

Under what English title was Nabokov's 1939 novella anticipating Lolita published in 1986?

The Enchanter. Nabokov believed he had destroyed the story, came across the typescript again after Lolita had appeared, and left it for his son Dmitri to translate.

What do the narrator of Lolita and the girl spend the year after her mother's death doing?

Driving across America. They cross the country twice, motel by motel; Nabokov knew those roads from his own long summer trips west, with his wife at the wheel.

Nabokov's own 1967 translation of Lolita, published in New York by Phaedra, was into which language?

Russian. He did the job himself for fear of what some later translator would make of it, and called the result 'the story of a disappointment': his own Russian was no longer the instrument he remembered.

At which university was Nabokov a professor of literature when Lolita came out in 1955?

Cornell. The money from Lolita and its film rights let him give up teaching in 1959, though he said afterwards that he had loved composing and delivering his lectures there.

Besides writing, Nabokov was an expert in which branch of natural science?

Butterflies. He looked after Harvard's collection for years as a research fellow, named new species, and said the research gave him even more pleasure than literature.

After Lolita's success, Nabokov moved to a hotel in which Swiss town, where he lived until he died?

Montreux. Royalties from the novel and its film let him leave teaching, and he and his wife took rooms at the Palace Hotel that stayed their home until his death in 1977.

Who directed the first film of Lolita, released in 1962?

Stanley Kubrick. With the author's consent he moved the novel's ending to the opening scene, reckoning that the story lost its grip halfway through if told in order.

Who played the narrator in the 1962 film of Lolita?

James Mason. Nabokov had little say in the production and saw most of his script discarded, yet he called the film 'absolutely first-rate' and praised its four main actors.

Nabokov received an Academy Award nomination for the 1962 film in which category?

Adapted screenplay. He spent six months in Hollywood on the script so that nobody else would write it, yet the director and producer reworked most of it and he kept the sole credit.

What shape are the red sunglasses in the famous publicity image for the 1962 film of Lolita?

Hearts. The heart-shaped glasses come from a publicity photograph, not from the film itself, where she looks over ordinary sunglasses; popular memory has merged the two.

Where was much of the 1962 film of Lolita, set in New England and the Midwest, actually shot?

Britain. The film was produced in England for financial reasons, so English suburbs had to pass for small-town America; only some background scenery was filmed in the United States.

Besides Hollywood's Production Code, which Catholic body did the director of the 1962 Lolita blame for restraining the film?

The Legion of Decency. He said the pressure kept him from dramatising the erotic side of the story, and later that he probably would not have made the film had he foreseen it.

Which comic actor plays the narrator's elusive rival in the 1962 film of Lolita, popping up in a string of disguises?

Peter Sellers. The director had heard his comedy records and wanted that range of voices, so a shadowy figure from the novel turns up as a nosy hotel guest, a school psychologist and more.

Who played the narrator in Adrian Lyne's 1997 film of Lolita?

Jeremy Irons. He also recorded the novel as an audiobook, so for many listeners his is the narrator's voice.

Unable to find a US distributor, Adrian Lyne's Lolita premiered in America on which cable network in 1998?

Showtime. The channel bought the American rights after the studios passed, so a feature made for cinemas reached most of its American audience on television, with only a brief theatrical run.

Which British playwright wrote a screenplay for the 1997 Lolita that the producers turned down?

Harold Pinter. David Mamet's draft was rejected as well, and the job went to Stephen Schiff, a magazine journalist who had never written a film script before.

Which playwright's 1981 stage version of Lolita flopped, with Nabokov appearing as 'A Certain Gentleman'?

Edward Albee. The production was a fiasco, and he later disowned it himself, insisting that what had been staged under his name was not his adaptation at all.

What became of the 1971 musical Lolita, My Love?

It closed before Broadway. Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist of My Fair Lady, and the film composer John Barry saw it savaged in Philadelphia, recast and reworked, and shut down in Boston.

Which Italian composer wrote the score for Adrian Lyne's 1997 film of Lolita?

Ennio Morricone. The composer of Sergio Leone's westerns wrote it for a film that, for all the famous names attached, most Americans first saw on television.

Azar Nafisi's 2003 memoir of a secret women's book group is titled Reading Lolita in which city?

Tehran. After leaving her last university post she gathered seven of her women students at her home each week to read Western novels, Nabokov's among them.

Which band's 1980 hit about a teacher tempted by a pupil mentions Nabokov by name?

The Police. 'Don't Stand So Close to Me' was written by Sting, a schoolteacher before the band took off, who admits that his rhyme for the author's name is one of the loosest in pop.

Which singer's 2012 breakthrough album played up a Lolita persona and added a bonus track named after the novel?

Lana Del Rey. She described the Born to Die persona herself, as a 'gangster Nancy Sinatra' and a Lolita lost in the hood, and names the novel among her influences.

In Japan, 'Lolita' became a positive word and gave its name to what?

A frilly, Victorian-inspired fashion. In Japanese the word came to mean simply sweet and adorable, and the style's petticoats and bell-shaped skirts won followers worldwide in the 1990s and 2000s.

Which later Nabokov novel jokes about a 'Hurricane Lolita' hitting the American east coast in 1958?

Pale Fire. 'Hurricane Lolita' was Nabokov's private name for the storm of publicity around the book in 1958, and four years later he slipped it into his new novel as a weather report.