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Vladimir Nabokov. LolitaFOREWORD"Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male," such werethe two titles under which the writer of the present note receivedthe strange pages it preambulates. "Humbert Humbert," their author,had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. Hislawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq.,now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit themanuscript, based his request on a clause in his client's willwhich empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in allmatters pertaining to the preparation of "Lolita" for print. Mr.Clark's decision may have been influenced by the fact that theeditor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for amodest work ("Do the Senses make Sense?") wherein certain morbidstates and perversions had been discussed.My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save forthe correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of afew tenacious details that despite "H.H."'s own efforts stillsubsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative ofplaces or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare),this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author's bizarrecognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask-throughwhich two hypnotic eyes seem to glow-had to remain unlifted inaccordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes withthe heroine's real surname, her first name is too closelyinterwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alterit; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there anypractical necessity to do so. References to "H.H."'s crime may belooked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers forSeptember-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continuedto come under my reading lamp.For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow thedestinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a fewdetails may be given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or"Ramsdale," who desires his identity suppressed so that "the longshadow of this sorry and sordid business" should not reach thecommunity to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, "Louise,"is by now a college sophomore, "Mona Dahl" is a student in Paris."Rita" has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida.Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to astillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlemen inthe remotest Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography,"My Cue," to be publshed shortly, and critics who have perused themanuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the variouscemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations andemotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader hadtheir expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions.True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work;indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modernconventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array offour-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by theirabsence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, aneditor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type ofmind might call "aphrodisiac" (see in this respect the monumentaldecision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey inregard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one wouldhave to forego the publication of "Lolita" altogether, since thosevery scenes that one might inpetly accuse of sensuous existence oftheir own, are the most strictly functional ones in the developmentof a tragic tale tending unsweri\vingly to nothing less than amoral apotheosis.