In The New Yorker, John Colapinto writes about Nabokov coming to America, and how important that was to the classic, Lolita.
“Lolita” was not, however, Nabokov’s first attempt to write a story about a pedophile who, enamored of a particular twelve-year-old girl, marries her mother to be closer to his love object—and who finds the girl in his clutches after the mother’s untimely death. His first attempt, a short novella called “The Enchanter,” was written in Russian shortly before his move to America. That novella, published posthumously, in 1986, by Vera and Dmitri Nabokov, shows just how important the atmosphere of America was to making “Lolita” the great work it is. Where “The Enchanter” is curiously dour, featureless, and vague, “Lolita” is a great, rollicking encyclopedia teeming with specific details of Nabokov’s adoptive country, sweeping into its embrace the entire American geography, from East to West, North to South, in Humbert’s zig-zagging car journeys with his under-aged sex slave (journeys that follow the same route as the decidedly more sedate butterfly-hunting trips that Nabokov made each summer with his wife).
'Til date, I've not been able to get past the first fifty pages of the classic, but, it's definitely not dour, featureless or vague. The writing is, dare I say, perfect.
The content, on the other hand, makes my stomach churn.