Nabokov, Vladimir | Lolita, first edition - photo 1
Nabokov, Vladimir | Lolita, first edition - photo 2

Nabokov, Vladimir | Lolita, first edition

Sold
$ 6 096
Auction dateClassic
08.12.2023 12:00UTC -04:00
Auctioneer
Sotheby´s
Event location
USA, New York
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The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 1111107
Lot 72 | Nabokov, Vladimir | Lolita, first edition
Nabokov, Vladimir
Lolita. Paris: the Olympia Press, 1955

2 vols., 12mo. Original printed green wrappers priced at Francs: 900 on both lower wrappers; only faintest bit of rubbing to spine edges, a lovely, tight copy with no evidence of price sticker removal. Quarter morocco case.

First edition, first issue of a controversial masterpiece.

At least five American publishers rejected Lolita: Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar Straus, and Doubleday. It was Maurice Girodias and the Paris-based Olympia Press that finally stepped up and published the work, four years and many court cases before it was issued by US and UK publishers.

The Partisan Review had agreed to print a portion of it, but only on the condition that Nabokov would sign the work; he refused, having decided that “its subject is such that V., as a college teacher, cannot very well publish it under his real name. Especially, since the book is written in the first person, and the ‘general’ reader has the unfortunate inclination to identify the invented ‘I’ of the story with its author.” He added, parenthetically, “This is, perhaps, particularly true of the American ‘general’ reader.”

All the while Nabokov defended his work to friends and publishers. He wrote to Morris Bishop: "I know that Lolita is my best book so far. I calmly lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art, and that no court could prove it to be ‘lewd and libertine.’ All categories grade, of course, into one another: a comedy of manners written by a fine poet may have its ‘lewd’ side; but ‘Lolita’ is a tragedy. ‘Pornography’ is not an image plucked out of context; pornography is an attitude and an intention. The tragic and the obscene exclude each other." (March 6, 1956, SL p. 184)
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