Word: lolitas
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...original audiences were undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell in the 1940s and 1950s. He had sojourned in England and Germany before moving to America in 1940. He began to write in English and taught college literature courses (including a seminar at Harvard) for a living. The extraordinary success of Lolita in 1958 allowed him to retire from the world...
...fashions the most exquisite narrative structures out of the most fragile allusions and symbolic patterns, and ices it all with an arch sense of humor. His late works, such as Ada, hint at layers of meaning that will keep scholars guessing for decades. His works will probably last: Lolita is already available in an annotated critical edition. Still, there is something missing in all of Nabokov's work. His starchy aestheticism comes through as cold, crystalline, and almost inhuman. We wait in vain for that warm human glow that pervades all the works of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov...
Indeed, nothing seems to have been rejected at all, except for taste and value. Throughout, Lolita proves to be less a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov than a travesty. To get to the hot question first, the play is no pornographic scorcher. True, there are guarded scenes of fellatio and cunnilingus, but in this era of X-rated films and worse, they are surprisingly restrained...
Almost everyone has heard of Lolita 's hero, Humbert Humbert (Donald Sutherland), a richly cultured European emigre who lusts perversely and voraciously for prepubescent girls whom he calls nymphets. In the nymphet he finds an "elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm" and something of a "demon." In a small New England town he spots his divine demon, Dolores Haze, a girl of 11½, played in this production by 24-year-old Blanche Baker...
...near her and to reap her virginity at an apt moment, Humbert marries her mother Charlotte (Shirley Stoler); By chance, she hurtles down a flight of stairs to her death and Humbert is free to pursue his lascivious designs. To his shock and chagrin, Lolita seduces...