Lolita, inscribed to William James, Jr. - photo 1
Lolita, inscribed to William James, Jr. - photo 2
Lolita, inscribed to William James, Jr. - photo 3
Lolita, inscribed to William James, Jr. - photo 4

Lolita, inscribed to William James, Jr.

Lot 226
28.01.2025 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Sold
$ 138 600
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 1360939
Lot 226 | Lolita, inscribed to William James, Jr.
Estimate value
$ 80 000 – 120 000
NABOKOV, Vladimir (1899-1977). Lolita. Paris: The Olympia Press, 1955.

An important presentation copy of the first edition, first printing, inscribed with a butterfly, to his close Cambridge friends: "For Alice and Billy from V / 23 April 1956." One of only three inscribed copies of the first edition of Lolita to be recorded at auction, according to RBH and ABSA.

The recipients of this copy of Lolita were William Jr. and Alice James. William was the son of the great philosopher (a favorite of Nabokov's), and the nephew of the novelist Henry. The couple became good friends of Vladimir and Véra in Cambridge through their mutual friends Harry and Elena Levin. The Nabokovs' social circle during his time teaching in New England was literary and impressive: among others, it included Mary McCarthy, Richard Wilbur, May Sarton, Arthur Schlesinger, Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bowen, Richard Ellman, and Adrienne Rich. It was at Billy and Alice's that Nabokov met Robert Lowell, whose description of his school St. Mark's would find its way into Pnin. And during his eight-month leave in 1953, during which time he worked prodigiously on his commentary for Eugene Onegin, he saw Billy and Alice most frequently, with their social calls providing his main respite. Nabokov later described James as "a dear soul with an admirable delicacy of string-tone" and was said to have treated him "in his most warmly ceremonious fashion" (qtd in Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years, Princeton UP, 1993).

On the occasion of Nabokov’s Award of Merit in 1969 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, William Maxwell would note: “Mr. Nabokov is the phoenix we had no reason to expect. He is one more in the line of great Russian storytellers, and, strangely, he is our own. We got him through accident; history displaced him. Personal deprivation made him a great literary artist… He is the vaudeville magician par excellence, astonishing us again and again by producing out of the air, in front of our eyes, life untampered with. He is also a poet dealing in prose fiction with the shifting, fictitious nature of reality, with the artifice that we call Time, with the aurora borealis of memory. There is no discoverable limit to the range of his talent. And sadness is his very home” (Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Second Series, No.20. New York, 1970. Publication No. 262 [pp.23-24]).

Two volumes, octavo. Original green wrappers printed in black, priced 900 Francs on lower wrappers (usual rubbing along joints and to upper cover of vol. 1, a little more so at spine ends). Provenance: William and Alice James, Jr (1882-1961; authorial inscription) – Gordon Waldorf (1933-2020; his sale, Sotheby's New York, 1 April 2014, lot 38).
Artist:Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977)
Place of origin:France
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