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Banning The Novel 'Lolita' By Vladimir Nabokov

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In 21st century people live in the world, where freedom of speech is highly valued, consequently, the freedom to read should be highly valued as well. Freedom to read means we are able to choose which book we can read, and there wouldn't be any censorship or book banning due to subject matter despite if language used is inappropriate or violent situations are described. However, banned books still exist in the 21st century-nowhere in the world everything can be published, although the restrictions of text vary from one country to another. I was surprised that one of these banned books was “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov, because I read it in high school as a part of Russian literature. Shortly after the novel’s “Lolita” publication in 1955 in France, followed banning of the book on grounds that book contained sexual …show more content…

The novel “Lolita” was published in 1955 in France and in the same year the book was banned in France. “Lolita’s” main character was a literature professor Humbert Humbert. Humbert develops inappropriate feelings towards his girlfriend’s 12year old daughter Delores. He married his girlfriend, so he would always be close to his true love- Dolores. Soon after the wedding, Dolores was sent to a summer camp, while Dolores was in summer camp, professor was thinking about her all the time and he kept his improper thoughts about her in journal. After a while the wife discovered the journal, and she was shocked to find out her husband’s secret desires, so she took the journal and tried to bring it to police, but it did not happen because she was accidentally hit by car and eventually died, as a result Humbert got back his journal. After the wife’s death, Humbert took Dolores out of the camp and gave her name Lolita. He took away her identity and gave her new one. Lolita became his prisoner, and she was sexually

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No matter how charming and well-educated Humbert is and how many serious mental issues might be found in Hermann, it is not how they are, but who they are that we remember about their characters. “Nabokov gives us more than enough material to understand and pity Dolores’s suffering, so the text cannot be said to advocate or justify Humbert’s acts” (Rodgers 113). Humbert is not capable of defending himself as his gruesome act of raping a child is what determines our thoughts about him as a human being. Sometimes Humbert’s confessions make us uncomfortable, for example when he mentions being intimate with her while underlining the fact that she is a child: “This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning” (Nabokov, “Lolita” 140) If we get caught in the trap of Humbert’s endearing story, though, we might then allow ourselves to think in a way Humbert would like us to think and to perhaps be outsmarted by him: “If readers laugh with Humbert, they are forced also either to laugh at themselves or to abandon moral discernment altogether, albeit temporarily” (Rodgers 115). If a reader gets too involved in Humbert’s story, then the chances are he will also lose his sense of morality or at least would adjust it to Humbert’s understanding of morality or the lack of

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