A “Safely Solipsized” Life: Lolita as Autobiography Revisited

“As a book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov's own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak, Memory” (xxiii), notes Alfred Appel, Jr. in his introduction to The Annotated Lolita, after bringing our attention to the “extent to which Nabokov consciously projected his own life in his fiction” (xxi). This statement should not be taken to imply an existence of a correlation between Lolita's characters or plot and Nabokov's biography, but the possibility to approach the novel as another version of the author's autobiography that focuses on Nabokov's experiences of loss and his struggle to recapture and preserve his past, granting himself—as well as the people and places of his past—a sort of immortality, over which he has the final word. Once fictionalized, these themes stop being a part of the random and uncontrollable fate that governs Nabokov, and become a part of his creation, “safely solipsized” (60), like Humbert Humbert's Lolita, and thus, supposedly manageable. However, just as Lolita, once created, gains agency and escapes her creator, questioning his authorship and his power over her, Lolita the novel may suggest that the past can never be tamed and will continue, instead, to hold the author in its grip.