THE TIME

"(Lolita) went off in the U.S. of the late '50s like a gun-shot in church. " - .

Time

"My poor Lolita is having a tough time," Nabokov wrote to Graham Greene of the book's reception in America. "The pity is that if I had made her a boy or a cow or a bicycle, philistines might never have flinched."

It is no surprise to discover that Lolita's creator translated Alice's Adventures In Wonderland into Russian. Lolita, after all, is Humbert's adventures in the hinterland of America's post-war period of... emptiness.