#vladimir nabokov lolita

[whydousernamesevenexist]

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

[your-fathers-favourite-daughter]

Girl activities ( trigger warning for mentions of the thoughts of a person in recovery? Mentions of d1s0rd3r3d thoughts. )

wondering how many bodies are hidden in your hometowns hills and forests

laying naked in bed tracing your scars

daydreaming about your future

pretending to look mysterious and read in front of your cafe crush

wondering what you would look like 50 lbs lighter than trying to decide if you want to relapse or not

brushing your hair with vintage silver hair brushes than wondering who all the women were who brushed their hair with it before you

writing poetry at 4 am

falling in love with your best friend

cleaning your room on a sunday

picking at your skin in the mirror till your whole face is red and swollen

daydreaming about bleaching your hair

cuddling your dog

remembering your dreams while sitting on the shower floor

watching movies, reading books, and watching shows, pondering the stories and characters and fantisizing about your life being like those stories

[diamondtrashangel]

🍒

[metamorphesque]

― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[cinnamonwhore]

lolita 1997

[cherries-in-wine]

𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒍𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒍𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒂 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒗𝒊𝒓𝒈𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒔 ‧₊ ☁️⋅♡ ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

People call Vladimir Nabokov a disgusting creep for writing from the perspective of a pedophile when in reality if you read the book, Humbert Humbert is not likeable in the slightest. He's an unreliable narrator that's so stuck in his own delusions that he can't see how miserable dolores is because of him. Nabokov is a great writer and lolita is really well written. It's a great satire in the sense that it's pathetic to see Humbert Humbert think he's sooo charming and these "nymphets" are soooo in love with him. Dolores' trauma is obvious to any competent reader, I don't know how people are so charmed by Humbert Humbert that they can't see how dolores' defiance which he refers to as "teenage rebellion" or "tantrums" is a very apparent cry for help. Lolita is a Gothic horror, a cautionary tale. It's a genius work of art and what's most horrific about it is how society reacted to it, how it's so normalised to sexualise little girls that blatant pedophilia is interpreted as a tragic love story. Nabokov himself referred to dolores as his "poor little girl". He had a lot of empathy for her and it must be so heartbreaking to see her getting sexualised.

When I first read the virgin suicides i thought it was a great work of satire. I adore the Lisbon girls with all my heart, I see a part of myself in all of them by varying degrees. The boys who claimed they loved these girls, only saw them as some fantasy. Even in death they never truly respected any of these girls. How when they found Cecelia's diary, instead of trying to make sense of why she killed herself, they selfishly searched for their own names. I loved the irony of the boys claiming they loved these girls when they didn't know anything about them. It showed how their "love" was really shallow and surface level. I thought Jeffrey Eugenides really understood me in that sense. But in reality he didn't mean any of the things the boys did to be interpreted as satire. According to him, peaking through windows, stealing used tampons, joking about groping dead girls, these grown men still picturing those little girls years later while they had sex with their wives etc was supposed to show that teenage boys are not disgusting horny dogs, but romantic softies (if anything this made me think teenage boys are much more repulsive than i thought). According to Eugenides the book is satire, but in the sense that you never know what was going through a person's head when they committed suicide and you can't make sense of it no matter how hard you try. Everything about how the boys viewed the girls was not satire and was to be taken at face value. This really broke my heart, an author who i thought really did get me and understood me, ended up making me feel watched instead of seen.

It's so interesting how lolita which is supposed to be from the perspective of an unreliable narrator was taken at face value and the virgin suicides which was to be taken at face value was perceived as satire.

The director of Lolita didn't get her at all, even he thought she was some kind of a seductress instead of a child that was abused repeatedly. While the virgin suicides movie was so much better than the book, Sofia Coppola, the director, understood the Lisbon girls so well and she did them justice.

[gabriestat]

lolita, vladimir nabokov / deathless, catherynne m. valente

[iphisesque]

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering.

My first attempts at creating a Lolita cover, following Nabokov's own original wishes

[whydousernamesevenexist]

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

[doloresdisparue]

dedications on lolita retellings (lo, lolita child, roger fishbite, my dark vanessa)

[bunniculadoll]

lolita as a novel is a perfect example of how powerful rich white men can get away with heinous crimes, and the structure of the book itself supports that because it gives us an direct insight into the inner thoughts of one of these men and just how much mental gymnastics they do to justify everything. and i feel like despite what ppl believe(wrongly), this book is inherently anti pedophilia because it dismisses the common claim that it’s the young girl’s fault that something bad happened, and why so many girls who have had similar experiences find comfort in it, and in dolores as a character. this is why, on top of many other reasons, the centering of white girls is so heartbreaking to see in the coquette community. the themes in lolita deal with the sexualization and abuse of young girls, which girls of color, specifically Black and indigenous girls experience disproportionately higher compared to white girls. so of course more girls of color are going to find comfort in a community that when done correctly and with good intentions, give power to dolores haze and girls who have experience with csa/sexualization/inappropriate relationships with older men. but so many of them are turned away from it because they don’t feel comfortable in a community full of mean rich white girls. i know for a fact that if i haven’t discovered coquette in 2020/2021 as a 17 year old who was just coming to terms with some of the horrible stuff i went through, i would’ve spiraled so much once i left home for college, and to think that there’s a girl of color out there who could’ve really benefited from a community that acknowledges the dark sides of girlhood but stayed away from it bc she thinks it’s for white girls only breaks my heart.

[lolitafan1997]

What is your favourite hairstyle for Lo?

[metamorphesque]

― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[beirarowling]

Did J.K. Rowling Fail the Lolita Test?

The functionally illiterate youth are canceling her for praising the classic novel.

By Kat Rosenfield

July 2, 2024

Like so many other digital-age absurdities, this one originates with a millennial who is mad at J.K. Rowling. Here’s what happened: in the year 2000, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, Rowling praised the novel, saying, “[A] plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabokov’s hands, a great and tragic love story.” Rowling’s sentiments about Lolita are not unique; Stanley Kubrick and Dorothy Parker famously felt the same, and my own copy even has a blurb on it from Vanity Fair, calling it “the only convincing love story of our century.”

Aaron Gwyn, a professor in the English department at UNC Charlotte, was mystified by the surge of moralizing discourse surrounding Lolita: “It’s absurd. Nabokov would be horrified by the idea of his art as any kind of a moral test,” he said to me. “He didn’t need a 400-page novel to tell us that a pedophile is bad. But he saw very clearly America’s worship of youth, and America’s lust after the girl—the nymphet—as an archetype, and he turns that inside out. Humbert is a monster, but he’s also seductive, in the prose, the humor. . . if the reader wasn’t on some level charmed, in the witchcraft sense, it wouldn’t be effective.”

I don’t like to engage in youth-bashing (some of my best friends are youths, and rumor has it I used to be one myself), but this seems to be a particular problem for members of the under-40 set—people who, like Kempner, appear utterly confounded not just by the difference between depiction and endorsement but by the expression of any thought that contains two or more moving parts. At the risk of stating the obvious, Rowling’s praise for the transformative power of Nabokov’s writing does not amount to an assertion that she found the plot of Lolita literally romantic.

[balkanparamo]

Lolita: Vladimir Nabokov