Lolita

Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject. The novel's narrator and main character, Humbert Humbert, becomes sexually obsessed with a prepubescent girl.

Literary allusions

• Humbert Humbert's first love, Annabel, is named after the woman in the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, their young love is described in phrases borrowed from Poe's poem.
• Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty.
• In March 2004 the German researcher Michael Maar discovered a short story named "Lolita" published in Germany in 1916. It was written by a certain Heinz von Lichberg. While the plot of this story resembles the summarized plot of Nabokov's Lolita, most scholars regard charges of plagiarism as completely overblown.