Lolita Trivia
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50 free Lolita trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Lolita trivia quiz covers Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel as a literary and publishing phenomenon: how it was written, refused, printed in Paris, denounced, banned, and finally became one of the best-selling and most argued-over books of the century. The easy questions handle the author, the narrator's pseudonym, Dolores Haze's real name, the coined word that entered the dictionary and the two directors who filmed it. From there it moves into the text: the Poe poem behind Annabel Leigh, the anagram hidden in a character's name, the town of Ramsdale, and how the foreword gives away the ending. The harder end is for Nabokov readers: the working title, the size of the first printing, the critic who called it dull three times, the MP whose career it damaged, the real 1948 kidnapping the book cites, the Broadway flop and the Swedish-language opera. The questions treat the subject matter seriously; the book is a study of a predator's self-justification, and the quiz reflects that. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the novel, its author, its publishers and its adaptations, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our classic novels, banned books and Stanley Kubrick quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The narrator of Lolita keeps addressing his memoir to which imagined audience?
A jury
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.
Q 02Under what pseudonym does the narrator of Lolita write his memoir?
Humbert Humbert
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'.
Q 03What is the real name of the girl the narrator calls 'Lolita'?
Dolores Haze
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.
Q 04What is the 12-year-old girl doing when the narrator of Lolita first sees her?
Sunbathing
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.
Q 05What subject does the narrator of Lolita teach and write textbooks about?
French literature
French literature. His textbook comparing French and English writers gives the memoir its excuse to drop in Flaubert, Proust, Baudelaire and Ronsard.
Q 06Lolita opens with a fictitious foreword by which invented editor of psychology books?
John Ray Jr.
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'.
Q 07The narrator's teenage first love, Annabel Leigh, takes her name from a poem by which writer?
Edgar Allan Poe
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.
Q 08What did Nabokov originally intend to call Lolita?
The Kingdom by the Sea
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.
Q 09In which fictional New England town does the narrator of Lolita lodge with the Haze family?
Ramsdale
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.
Q 10How does Charlotte Haze die, moments after reading the narrator's diary in Lolita?
She is hit by a car
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.
Q 11In Lolita, which famous playwright turns out to have taken the girl from the hospital in Elphinstone?
Clare Quilty
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.
Q 12What is hidden in the Lolita character name Vivian Darkbloom?
The author, in anagram
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.
Q 13According to the foreword of Lolita, how does the title character die?
In childbirth
Q 21Which country banned Lolita for two years from December 1956?
France
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.
Q 22Which American publisher finally issued Lolita in the United States in August 1958?
G. P. Putnam's Sons
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.
Q 23Lolita was the first novel since which book to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks in the US?
Gone with the Wind
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.
Q 14Which old word did Lolita give a new meaning that most dictionaries now record?
Nymphet
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.
Q 15Nabokov built up Lolita and his other novels by writing scenes in any order on what?
Index cards
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.
Q 16Who stopped Nabokov when he tried to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita?
His wife Véra
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.
Q 17Lolita was first published in 1955 in which city?
Paris
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'.
Q 18Which publisher, better known for erotica, issued the first edition of Lolita?
Olympia Press
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.
Q 19Which English novelist rescued Lolita by naming it a best book of 1955 in the Sunday Times?
Graham Greene
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.
Q 20Which novel knocked Lolita off the top of the US bestseller list in 1958?
Doctor Zhivago
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.
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.
Q 24The New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott called Lolita repulsive and, three times over, what?
Dull
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.
Q 25What did publishing Lolita in 1959 help to cost the publisher Nigel Nicolson?
His seat in Parliament
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.
Q 26Nabokov said a newspaper story about which caged animal's first drawing gave him the 'initial shiver' for Lolita?
An ape
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.
Q 27Under what English title was Nabokov's 1939 novella anticipating Lolita published in 1986?
The Enchanter
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.
Q 28What do the narrator of Lolita and the girl spend the year after her mother's death doing?
Driving across America
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.
Q 29Nabokov's own 1967 translation of Lolita, published in New York by Phaedra, was into which language?
Russian
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.
Q 30At which university was Nabokov a professor of literature when Lolita came out in 1955?
Cornell
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.