A Thousand Faces of Lolita – Sex and Art on the Covers of Nabokov’s NovelsA new book just dropped here in New York City titled *Lolita — The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design*. It’s a fascinating deep dive where 80 different designers weigh in on what they think the "perfect" Lolita cover should actually look like. The editor behind this collection, Nabokov scholar George Levings, has spent his time dissecting half a century of the book's visual history and how it's been represented over the years.
Now, let's be honest—Nabokov was incredibly picky about visual art. What did he actually care about when it came to an image or a film?
He was a student of the brilliant Dobuzinski, though—let's face it—he wasn't exactly the most diligent pupil. And he absolutely loathed abstract art. He once famously compared Salvador Dalí to a twin version of Norman Rockwell who had been kidnapped by Gypsies during childhood. Later in life, he actually developed a soft spot for comic books. When it came to movies, he leaned toward comedies, and in private conversations, he didn't hold back his disdain for the *Lolita Stanley Kubrick* adaptation. He described the film as being shot through the "eyes of a passenger lying in the back of an ambulance." That said, he viewed the marketing gimmicks—you know, those provocative drawings of young girls meant to grab attention—as an inevitable evil necessary to drive book sales. And honestly, when it came to literary marketing, nobody could touch Nabokov.
But what did he think about people trying to "visualize" his prose? Didn't he feel that a *Lolita* cover risked reducing his entire brilliant novel down to one single theme: sex?
Nabokov was strictly against putting young ladies on covers. However, he did show a certain amount of leniency toward nymphets. He actually found the French Penguin Random House paperback edition quite amusing—on the front, you see a girl with light brown pigtails, but on the back, you see the back of her head, her part, and those two pigtails. It’s almost as if the text of the novel is tucked right inside the protagonist's head.
So, what have illustrators done to emphasize that we're talking about childhood sexuality specifically, rather than just general adult themes?
In the US alone, *Lolita* moves an average of 50,000 copies every year. Let's be real: the novel is going to pull readers in regardless of whatever image is slapped on the jacket. Because of that, many artists use subtle nods to childhood sexuality—think crushed candy or lipstick—before falling back on more conventional tropes. A standout example can be found in the illustrations for Nabokov's work in *Playboy*. Back in the '60s, the editors commissioned Robert Parker and Roland Ginzel to create illustrations for translations of *Despair and Harassment*, as well as snippets from the novel *Ada*. Of course, Nabokov had some opinions on these too. In one telegram, he basically lectured the artist for an unrealistic depiction of *Ada*'s bust, telling him to go study an anatomy textbook. He even described a depiction of two lovers passionately kissing in the night as "two disgusting frogs."
There was also this interesting situation involving a piece by the famous designer John Gall, commissioned by the prestigious Random House. Originally, Gall went for a close-up of female lips positioned vertically on the *Lolita* cover, creating a heavy sense of ambiguity that looked like both a mouth and genitalia at the same time. The reaction was totally split; one editor flew into a rage, while another loved it so much he asked the artist for a copy so he could frame it. In the end, the book was published with those same lips, but rotated horizontally.
What do you guys think about the Russian covers?
In most cases, those covers are secondary works that reuse existing imagery: classic paintings, attractive nymphets, or fragments of advertising posters. There's also a specific category of Russian covers that are just simple clips from Hollywood films. For instance, toward the end of the last century, when the second film adaptation of Nabokov's novel (the Adrian Lyne version) was huge, at least six Russian editions popped up featuring the faces of actors Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. By the way, Lyne's film didn't really make it in America because it was released right around the time the US Congress passed laws to prevent child pornography, which spooked the distributors. But in Yeltsin's Russia? The distributors weren't worried about anything.
The way American publishers have been treating *Lolita* lately really brings to mind something Sergei Dovlatov once said—he basically dismissed Nabokov’s heroine as just your "typical Russian girl." Seriously, they’ve been depicting her as some innocent kid in a sailor suit set against a backdrop of birch trees. And then there are the truly bizarre choices: take that 1997 edition from their vintage romance series, for instance. It uses this striking profile of a young woman—an old clip from a mid-century poster used to hawk men's collars. On the cover, you only see a cropped, out-of-context female head, but in the original work, Joseph Leyendecker actually focused on the man standing behind her. See, the artist was gay, which adds a whole other layer of subtext they completely missed.
And if we're talking about terrible covers, we can't ignore that one where they took a painting by Gustav Klimt, cropped it at the knees, and slapped an ExxonMobil logo right between her thighs. I mean, come on. You couldn't imagine a major Western publishing house putting a photo of an exposed underage girl on a back cover like that Moscow-based outfit Tf-Progress did. This isn't some stylized drawing or artistic interpretation; it's a contemporary photograph of an actual naked minor, which shifts the entire perception of the novel into a completely different, much darker register.
Look, a good book cover should be a collaborative effort—it needs to be a striking, original interpretation of the text. But the more complex the novel, the harder it is for an artist working within such tight constraints to capture the core idea while still making a meaningful artistic statement. Of course, you also have to satisfy the publisher and the consumer in this cutthroat market. But *Lolita* is complicated because it forces us to take a stand regarding the characters. We have to fight through the sheer aesthetic beauty of the prose to navigate this ethical labyrinth—who are we supposed to sympathize with? Lolita or Humbert? Who seduced whom first? And how are we even meant to process that decaying, gritty landscape of 1950s Puritanical America?
http://hr.rbth.com/arts/2013/08/25/t...ana_21639.html
