Who create Lolita: Vladimir Nabokov or Stanley Kubrick?

This article poses two questions: to what extent can we identify Lolita as a Russian novel, and, secondly, to analyze the strategies of its screen adaptations. Lolita is Vladimir Nabokov's most controversial novel, published in English in Paris in 1955 (Nabokov would himself translate it into Russian in 1967). As a work of considerable and occasionally confounding complexity, it challenges the reader to question the reality of the written word, and, at its dénouement, the actuality of the preceding 300 pages. There is probably no other novel more ‘literary' than Lolita. But one important question is: set in the USA and written in English, how can this be categorized as a Russian novel? The second, no less important, theme is: how can a work of literature based on imaginative play and symbolism be turned into a cinematic work of graphic realism?