This play in three acts is Nabokov’s version of Lolita’s screenplay and not the one used for producing the 1962 movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.

While the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blest matter as I am. I can still talk to you and make you live in the minds of later generations. I’m thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Up until the final scene, I was actually more engaged with this screenplay than I had been with the novel. This was for the same reason that the novelic screenplay is normally criticized: so much is left out. While the novel is sunk deep in the folds of Humbert Humbert's mind, the screenplay has to stop short. The film requires detachment. And in the white space left by this detachment, you begin to see, for the first time, the ostensible subject of the book and the movie: Lolita. Dolly. She has the real psychological drama: a kid wrestling for her own sexual identity in an impossible culture -- a culture with extremely strict purity-rules for girls coupled with economic and social conditions that place them so fully in the control of rapists like Humbert Humbert. Her cynicism and resentment and eventual escape are profoundly moral gestures -- and they look awfully like the kind of nasty teenage rebellion we try to drum out of little girls in favor of feminine pliability.

But once I caught a whiff of this, I only became frustrated that Nabokov continually neglected this story line, this psychology, in favor of whatever little soul-quibbles his pedophile might be burping up. And finally, once Humby couldn't damage Dolly anymore, old Vlad just did away with her. Keep her young and nymphic for life -- her final tragedy to have her flattened self immortalized in the prose of her adoring misogynist rapist.

This would be a very disjointed movie overall, but there's something here and I love it as a new form of my favorite book. I don't like that he has people other than Humbert refer to Dolores as Lolita, but overall I really like this!

As it's Nabokov and it's his Lolita, there are inevitably a lot of great things about this screenplay, especially compared to Kubrick's Lolita, which is enjoyable but a different creature altogether. Nabokov is himself throughout the entire screenplay and is often quite witty in the stage directions -- for instance, a narrator for a commercial about peaches is "A FRUITY VOICE". Or Nabokov takes the time to be humorous: the collie that was supposed to be hit by the van, the van that instead struck Charlotte, is happily going from group to group of the people gathered around her dead body. etc.

Furthermore, here Charlotte was allotted her due grace; instead of being the petty, shrewish mother of the movie, here she actually seems to like her daughter quite a lot, something that's a lot more tenable for me.

On its own, it's orders of magnitude less impressive than the novel. It's best as a supplement, so it can gain from the novel's brilliance without suffering by a comparison with the novel: it clarifies quite a few things that I somehow managed to miss in the novel, like the fact that Mona is Vivian Darkbloom's niece, and thus her friendship with Dolly is also Dolly's link to Quilty.

Probably its greatest virtue is the insight it gives to the relationship between Humbert and Dolly; it's more removed from Humbert, which means that you can actually see how he is externally. And it was astonishing, to read Humbert declaring to her things like, "I love you, I adore you," or, "You know I'll die if you leave me." That removal from Humbert meant not only that the screenplay revealed a bit of the more veiled hijinks of the novel (Quilty pursuing Humbert, for example; I'd been under the impression that the shifting cars tailing Humbert were actually a figment of his paranoia, something the screenplay disabused me of) and, also, there was a greater dollop of Dolly than in the novel.

(One quibble: on the announcement of her death, Dolly is called by her maiden name and not Mrs. Richard F. Schiller. That was a detail that I would have preferred preserved.)

Reading this made me more convinced than ever that Lolita is the best book ever written

has some fun lines. was afraid it would challenge my interpretation of the novel. hardly scathed. nabokov himself couldn't tell me otherwise.

The screenplay stays pretty accurate to the story however I watched the 1962 movie along with reading the screenplay and the movie emitted so much and Kubrick didn't do this screenplay justice at all.

Up until the final scene, I was actually more engaged with this screenplay than I had been with the novel. This was for the same reason that the novelic screenplay is normally criticized: so much is left out. While the novel is sunk deep in the folds of Humbert Humbert's mind, the screenplay has to stop short. The film requires detachment. And in the white space left by this detachment, you begin to see, for the first time, the ostensible subject of the book and the movie: Lolita. Dolly. She has the real psychological drama: a kid wrestling for her own sexual identity in an impossible culture -- a culture with extremely strict purity-rules for girls coupled with economic and social conditions that place them so fully in the control of rapists like Humbert Humbert. Her cynicism and resentment and eventual escape are profoundly moral gestures -- and they look awfully like the kind of nasty teenage rebellion we try to drum out of little girls in favor of feminine pliability.

But once I caught a whiff of this, I only became frustrated that Nabokov continually neglected this story line, this psychology, in favor of whatever little soul-quibbles his pedophile might be burping up. And finally, once Humby couldn't damage Dolly anymore, old Vlad just did away with her. Keep her young and nymphic for life -- her final tragedy to have her flattened self immortalized in the prose of her adoring misogynist rapist.