There are literary works so controversial that the vicissitudes surrounding their publication could provide another book. This is what has happened with Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (Saint Petersburg, 1899-Montreux, 1977). The release of the novel in the United States in 1958 caused such a scandal that the author's own wife, Vera, recorded all of her adventures in her personal diary. This text, of just over a hundred pages, under the title L'Ouragan Lolita (Hurricane Lolita), is now published in France by Éditions de l'Herne.
Once again it is transgressive France that breaks the taboo. Lolita was first published in Molière's homeland, albeit in English, in 1955. Nabokov's daring exploration of pedophilia and incest, that passion of a 37-year-old man for his 12-year-old stepdaughter, provoked the rejection of American editors. On the other side of the Atlantic, still deeply imbued with the puritanism of the founding fathers, they considered the book a total obscenity, a perverse pornography with which they could not be complicit.
Nabokov himself wrote some diary entries, but it is believed – or so legend goes – that most were Vera's. The novelist himself wanted to strengthen that version. The first texts are from June 1958 and the last from August 1960. Custodied as a treasure in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the diary is now published for the first time, which is, again, a reason for international interest, of morbidity, but no longer of excitement. The exclusive news was given in France by the weekly Le Point, which in its last issue advanced part of the content.
On December 1, 1958, the diary notes that the agent of the playwright Mary Chase, who had a work registered with the title Lolita in 1954, asked them to change the title of the novel with the following argument: “Mary Chase is a well-known playwright. And, after all, who is Vladimir Nabokov?”
Another interesting entry is that of January 29, 1959: “Graham Greene has asked his partner (Reinhardt, from the British publisher Bodley Head) to write to V. (Vladimir) to tell him that, according to credible information, Lolita was going to be published with significant cuts, that Bodley Head wants to publish the full text and that Greene would himself sign the contract for Bodley, thus becoming the target of the accusations. As he has told Peter (Peterson), he agrees to go to jail for Lolita, since 'there couldn't be a better reason.' There would also be the possibility that the censors would hesitate to arrest the editor of Lolita if it is Graham Greene.”
Vera Nabokov's posthumous role does justice to the enormous influence that, according to all accounts, she exerted on her husband. Not only does it seem that she saved Lolita's manuscript from the flames, which he, fearing scandal, wanted to destroy, but that she always acted as secretary, translator, literary agent and chauffeur for her husband. According to Le Point, Vera even assumed the role of bodyguard, fearing that some madman wanted to kill him. Hence, she always carried a small Browning pistol in her purse, just in case. The French weekly rescues a comical photo of the unique couple, in a forest in Ithaca, in the state of New York, in 1958, in which they are both seen walking with butterfly nets in their hands and the ironic statement of the writer. “My pleasures are the most intense that man can know: writing and hunting butterflies.”
This love for lepidopterans appears in the newspaper, devoted above all to the evolution of sales of the controversial book and the public debate about its content, inside and outside the United States.
