In our past article, “Nabokov, Cruelty, and the Puzzle of Lolita,” we proposed that Dolores Haze is not real and that Humbert Humbert created the deeply cruel surface story of Lolita in order to mask true events of the novel. To access the second, buried story of the book, we believe readers must engage in a riddle or puzzle, tracking down details in order to reveal what Nabokov referred to as the elegant solution.1 In this article, we won’t try to give a full solution, but will instead highlight two reasons we believe attempting to solve the puzzle of Lolita is worth the effort.
First, Nabokov promised satisfying solutions to his novels, and we’re inclined to believe him. When asked why he wrote Lolita, Nabokov replied, “I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”2 Additionally, he preferred an active relationship with his readers, comparing the dynamic to wrestling in bright dust or climbing a mountain.3 In the latter analogy, he concludes that the author and reader meet at the top and “embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.”4 Notably, he sees the author embracing the reader, not laughing at or kicking the reader back down the mountain. Based on such quotes, we believe Lolita is solvable, and that its solution will be satisfying in the end.
The second reason we believe Lolita is worth the effort is that details shining through the surface story point repeatedly toward World War II, an era of mass violence for many, and for Nabokov personally, which we believe could transform Lolita into a different story altogether. In the remainder of this article, we will outline the details we find most suggestive of a secondary story rooted in World War II.
To begin, we are not the first readers to notice World War II in Lolita’s pages. The scholar Andrea Pitzer provides an excellent summary of such details, specifically those related to the Holocaust, in her article, “‘A Gentile’s House’: Lolita and the Holocaust.”5 Pitzer highlights various antisemitic comments, signs, and images surrounding Humbert, in one example pointing out his “nightmares of vivisection and ‘the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.’” She ponders, “Is Humbert actually Jewish, or does mid-century prejudice against foreigners just lead others to see him so?” Pitzer also traces similar words and images in Stanley Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Lolita, for which Nabokov wrote the original script. In one scene, Dolores performs a Nazi salute toward her mother and exclaims, “Sieg Heil!” (Hail Victory).
Beyond Andrea Pitzer’s observations, the detail we find most convincing of World War II in Lolita is when Humbert calls himself “Hamburg” on three separate occasions.6 This German city may seem like random wordplay, but Vladimir’s brother, Sergey, was murdered in a Hamburg concentration camp in 1945, just four years before Vladimir began drafting Lolita in 1949. In his memoir Speak Memory, Vladimir writes of Sergey: “A frank and fearless man, he criticized the regime in front of colleagues, who denounced him. He was arrested, accused of being a ‘British spy’ and sent to a Hamburg concentration camp where he died of inanition on January 10, 1945.”7 In some ways, this horrible loss makes Humbert’s urgent exclamation of “Bruder,” the German word for “brother,” seem unmistakably personal:
“Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was!”8
In 1941, Vladimir published The Real Life of Sebastian Night, a novel he later confirmed was an attempt to write about his brother. In 1951, he published the first edition of his autobiography Speak Memory and avoided discussing Sergey’s fate altogether. Simply because he “balked” in the past at the “inordinately hard” task of writing about his brother does not mean he did not try again in Lolita.9
One objection to this idea of World War II in Lolita is that the majority of the novel takes place in the United States. If Humbert never left Europe, how could he have possibly invented the America he inhabits? As with Dolores Haze, we believe the answer lies in Humbert’s ability to engineer scenes—a trick that becomes visible if one pays careful attention to their details. For example, Humbert provides vivid images of the American countryside and Appalachia, but he connects such images to “painted oilcloths” from European nurseries and “a map of North America that had ‘Appalachian Mountains’” from his childhood.10 Similarly, when describing his road trip with Dolores, Humbert possesses “an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes.”11 Is it possible Humbert is sketching America from remembered paintings, maps, and tour books rather than life? Our narrator appears to hint at exactly this phenomenon when he describes his journey with Dolores: “[T]he lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.”12 By collecting such details, it becomes possible to suspect that, with the help of various materials, Humbert could have invented the America he depicts. Famously, Nabokov highlights this same labor of invention in the Afterword of Lolita, writing, “It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced with the task of inventing America.”13
An additional clue that points toward Humbert having never left Europe occurs in a filmed interview given by Nabokov in 1958. He observes, “The good reader notices that Humbert Humbert confuses, just to take an instance, hummingbirds with hawk moths. Now I would never do that being an entomologist.”14 This assertion is a bit odd, especially since Humbert only observes hummingbirds twice—once as a flock, and once while hunting.15 Sure, hummingbirds don’t travel in groups, so the flock Humbert witnesses is probably hawk moths as Nabokov points out, but why does this matter? One reason is that hummingbirds do not exist outside of North and South America—if Nabokov is certain Humbert saw hawk moths instead of hummingbirds, perhaps this is a clue toward our narrator having never left Europe. A second reason for drawing attention to this flock of apparent hawk moths could be that such moths have been prominently associated with World War II—ever since, as the BBC article titled “Humming-Bird Hawk-Moth” notes, “[a] swarm was observed crossing the English Channel towards England on the day of the D-Day landings in 1944.”16
One final element of World War II in Lolita can be traced in Dolores Haze’s embodiment of a French youth movement called the Zazous, which was inspired by the swing jazz music scenes in both the United States and Great Britain. This movement occurred in Paris from roughly 1940-1944, during the German occupation. The regime valued duty, austerity, and a natural appearance, so the youth movement in Paris embraced sarcasm and luxury; wild dancing; and maximalist, extravagant clothing, especially checkered patterns and oversized suits called “zoot suits.”17 Girls in particular wore pleated skirts, oversized or very high heeled shoes, dark glasses, and red lipstick.18
In Lolita, Dolores Haze embodies nearly every element of the Zazous movement. She is frequently sarcastic.19 Humbert notes her various indulgences and observes, “She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.”20 Dolores also dances wildly, “flexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on her toes.”21 She lists “Sweet hot jazz” as one of her “beloved” things, and “zoot-suiters with trumpets” appear on her road trip with Humbert.22 She wears checkered dresses, pleated skirts, shoes that “looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her,” dark glasses, and red lipstick.23 Finally, in what is perhaps the most prominent detail connecting Dolores to such a youth movement, Humbert watches his step-daughter on her bicycle and comments: “Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle.”24 In some ways, Dolores’s close embodiment of the Zazous youth movement could provide a source for Humbert’s relentlessly Western depiction of her—perhaps he fabricated her image from resistant French teenagers—perhaps he never left Paris.
Regardless of what secondary story emerges from the excavation of Lolita, our hunch is that it will involve World War II, and that it will be highly specific—a solution woven into the details. Nabokov’s fondness for the particular is perhaps best highlighted in his comments on one of his own Russian poems: “Let me explain it: there are two persons involved, a boy and a girl, standing on a bridge above the reflected sunset, and there are swallows skimming by, and the boy turns to the girl and says to her, ‘Tell me, will you always remember that swallow? – not any kind of swallow, not those swallows, there, but that particular swallow that skimmed by?’ And she says, ‘Of course I will,’ and they both burst into tears.”25 This idea that the particular matters—that an individual swallow, or indeed, an individual life, is important and worthy of remembrance—may provide some direction when it comes to hunting for the solution of Lolita. We are still trekking up the novel’s rocky slopes ourselves, (and we have many more secondary sources to explore), but we hope this article may prompt some curiosity, or, better yet, some ideas of your own.
— M.
Nabokov, Vladimir, Strong Opinions, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973, 16.
Nabokov, Vladimir, Strong Opinions, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973, 16.
Nabokov, Vladimir, Strong Opinions, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973, 183.; Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1980, 2.
Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1980, 2.
Pitzer, Andrea, “‘A Gentile’s House’: Lolita and the Holocaust,” The CJM, accessed December 29, 2025, https://www.thecjm.org/learn_resources/65.
All citations from Lolita, henceforth L, come from the Second Vintage International Edition, 1997, 109, 261, 262.
Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory, First Vintage International Edition, August, 1989, 258.
L, 262.
Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory, First Vintage International Edition, August, 1989, 257.
L, 152, 209.
L, 154.
L, 176.
L, 312.
“Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita in 1958,” CBC, November 26, 1958, at 4:23 minutes, https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3627785.
L, 157, 216.
“Humming-Bird Hawk-Moth,” BBC, accessed December 29, 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/worldonthemove/species/humming-bird-hawk-moth/.
Savage, Jon, Teenage : The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875-1945, New York: Penguin, 2008, 383, 386-388; Peiss, Kathy Lee, Zoot Suit : The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 157.
Savage, Jon, Teenage : The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875-1945, New York: Penguin, 2008, 387.
L, 64, 220.
L, 148.
L, 182.
L, 148, 155.
L, 43, 49, 57, 107, 111; 107; 111; 39, 142; 204, 255.
L, 188.
Nabokov, Vladimir, Strong Opinions, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973, 14.