The seduction

Vladimir Nabokov (left) in September 1958. ''L'Affaire Lolita,'' as the French had christened it, was just beginning its long career. THE ELOQUENCE OF EVIL? James Mason as Humbert Humbert (top right) in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film version of ''Lolita.'' Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (bottom right), in confinement in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann's disgust with ''Lolita'' raises the unsettling question of how to read the novel.

N THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family's first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country's best butterfly hunting.

On those trips, during sudden rainstorms, bouts of insomnia, long drives, and flashes of impromptu inspiration in this or that alpine meadow, the Russian emigre Nabokov began to jot down on three-by-five-inch cards a singular story. This story was to become the greatest and most controversial American novel of the 20th century: ''Lolita."...more here