Lolita. The story of a cover girl. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel in art and design

Abstract

The story of a cover girl. Vladimir Nabokov's novel in art and design, edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving, Blue Ash, OH, Print Books, 2013, 256 pp., $30.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-440-32986-9Pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls - these are the words printed in a bold outline on a bright green backdrop which precede the title of The of a Girl. This ekphrastic image is Vladimir Nabokov's directive to his publishers for the cover of his Not surprisingly, this image and its negated ending (no girls) are repeated more than once in the essays in John Bertram and Yuri Leving's volume on the history, controversy, and imaging of Nabokov's (in)famous novel; for, as Bertram and Leving state from the outset, if there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is (15).The inspiration for the volume springs from Dieter E. Zimmer's online gallery of 200 Lolita covers, his cheekily titled Covering Lolita. Highlighting close to 60 years of international publishing history, the essays and accompanying reproductions in the volume include Zimmer's own contribution Dolly as Girl, and Duncan White's Dyeing Lolita: Nymphet in the Paratext. Each contribution traces the many paths to misreading Lolita in light of her manifestations in visual and textual adaptations, on the book cover and in various intertexts. Yuri Leving's Selling Concubines: Who is the Face of the Russian Lolita? gives flight to the dynamic story of the visual and textual translations and exchanges which shaped the novel's smuggling, publication, and marketing in Russia, while Paul Maliszewski's Paperback invites a welcome consideration of not only Lolita covers, but also the author's intervention in a wide array of cover iconography for Pnin and others. In a virtual age, this book's high-quality image reproductions are a welcome and clear reminder of the imperative to reinscribe the freewheeling image in context - especially, as Ellen Pifer reminds us, an image as vulnerable as Lolita.The visually based contributions from artists also bring a fresh perspective to approaching Nabokov's work. Artist Barbara Bloom's Cover Story examines her work with book covers, including her original designs and adaptations for an exhibition of Nabokov's own library in the gallery space. Her butterflied photographs of Nabokov and his novels, coupled with her own reimagining of the Lolita cover, are noteworthy contributions to the Nabokov imaginary. Following Bloom's collection is another adaptation of the life of Lolita by the Women's Design + Research Unit, Sian Cook and Teal Trigg's own meta-visual cataloguing from book (Nabokov) to film (Stanley Kubrick) to photographs (Bert Stem's publicity slides for Kubrick's film). The visual essay that follows is both richly graphic and illuminating, but culminates in the open-ended marketing question included on a Lolita film poster: How did they ever make a movie of LolitaT' (61). Certainly, the return to the Kubrick film is a watershed moment in Lolita imaging. …