Лолита

Комментарии и словарь 
Ю. В. Гадаевой

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

LOLITA

MODERN PROSE

УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Анг-93
 
Н 13

Набоков, Владимир Владимирович. 

Н 13 Лолита: Книга для чтения на английском языке / 
В. В. Набоков. — Санкт-Петербург : КАРО, 2019. — 
544 стр. — (Мoderne Prosa).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1402-5.

Владимир Набоков — знаменитыирусскиипи са-
тель, пе ру которого принадлежат также з а ме ча тельные 
произ ве де ния на англииском языке. «Лолита» — 
один из самых чи тае мых романов в мире.
Предлагаем читателям неадаптированныитекст 
ро ма на. Книга предназначена студентам вузов, слу-
ша те лям кур сов иност ран ных языков и  и всем лю бите 
лям современноилитературы. Роман пе ча тает ся с 
при мечаниями и словарем.

УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Англ— 93

Copyright © 1955 Vladimir Nabokov 
All rights reserved
© КАРО, 2019 
Все права защищены
ISBN 978-5-9925-1402-5

PART ONE

   1   

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my 
soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three 
steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. 
Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four 
feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly 
at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line1. But in my 
arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In 
point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had 
I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a 
princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years 
before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You 
can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one 
is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged 
seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

1 the dotted line — место для подписи (на документах)

   2   

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, 
easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, 
of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the 
Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute 
some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a 
luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grand-
fathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty 
he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, 
the alpinist, and grand-daughter of two Dorset parsons, 
experts in obscure subjects — palacopedology and Aeolian 
harps1, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a 
freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, 
save for2 a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing 
of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, 
over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing 
under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, 
you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, 
with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly 
entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a 
hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of 
my father’s had married and then neglected, served in 
my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and 
housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been 

1 palacopedology and Aeolian harps — палеопедология и Эоловы 
арфы

2 save for — за исключением

in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly 
taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by 
the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, 
despite the rigidity — the fatal rigidity — of some of her 
rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness 
of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had 
pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote 
poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew 
she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her 
husband, a great traveller in perfumes, spent most of his time 
in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired 
a bit of real estate.
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of il-
lustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea 
vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mi-
rana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed 
cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. 
From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flannelled poten-
tate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly 
American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like 
towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not 
pay my father bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher 
petit papa1, took me out boating and biking, taught me to 
swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and 
Les Miserables2, and I adored and respected him and felt 
glad for him whenever I over-heard the servants discuss his 

1 mon cher petit papa — мой дорогой папочка (фр.). Здесь и 
далее перевод с фр. М. Брусовани. 
2 Don Quixote and Les Miserables — «Дон Кихот» (М. Сервантес) 
и «Отверженные» (В. Гюго) (фр.) 

various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made 
much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my 
cheerful motherlessness.
I attended an English day school a few miles from home, 
and there I played rackets and fives1, and got excellent marks, 
and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers 
alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember 
as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, 
before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous 
and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose 
garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then 
celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the 
three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the 
part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, 
with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous La Beauté 
Humaine2 that I had filched from under a mountain of 
marble-bound Graphics3 in the hotel library. Later, in his 
delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the 
information he thought I needed about sex; this was just 
before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée4 in 
Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in 
the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme5 
de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain 
to, nobody to consult.

1 rackets and fives — игры в мяч, при которых его ударяют оá 
стену ракеткой или ладонüю
2 La Beauté Humaine — человеческая красота (фр.) 
3 Graphics — иллюстрированный журнал
4 lycée — лиöей (фр.) 
5 Mme — сокр. от Madame — Мадам (фр.)

   3   

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: 
half English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her 
features far less distinctly today than I did a few years 
ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual 
memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in 
the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and 
then I see Annabel in such general terms as: ‘honey-
coloured skin’, ‘thin arms’, ‘brown bobbed hair’, ‘long 
lashes’, ‘big bright mouth’); and the other when you 
instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside 
of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica 
of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colours (and 
this is how I see Lolita).
Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing 
Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months 
my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, 
and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from 
Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered 
Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed 
them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral af-
fairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting 
it pour through her fingers. Our brains were tuned the 
way those of intelligent European pre-adolescents were 
in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual 
genius should be assigned to our interest in the plural-
ity of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, 
solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby 
animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to 

be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted 
to be a famous spy.
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, ago-
nizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, 
because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been 
assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating 
every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we 
were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so 
easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt 
we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more 
later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of 
earshot but not out of sight of the populous part of the 
plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our 
elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified parox-
ysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in 
space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden 
in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown 
fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent 
knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a 
chance rampart built by younger children granted us suf-
ficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these 
incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced 
young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even 
the cool blue water, under which we still clawed at each 
other, could bring relief.
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings 
of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt 
which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, 
lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer 
courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk 
café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in