The book "Lolita" with a handwritten drawing, a handwritten wish and an autograph by Vladimir Nabokov

The book "Lolita" with a handwritten drawing, a handwritten wish and an autograph, presented to Sergey Obrazov

Nabokov, V. Lolita. Translated from English by the author. Ann Arbor: Ardis, [1976]. USA, Michigan. In the font publishing cover.

The text of the handwritten inscription on top: "For Sergei Obrazov from Vladimir Nabokov. 17.XII.1976. Montreux».
After the handwritten address and the date, the place is marked — the city of Montreux in Switzerland, where he has been living in the Montreux Palace Hotel with his wife Vera Slonim for the last seventeen years.

The colored pencil drawing of a butterfly and the inscription "Colias lolita Nab." (Latin) is probably a game with the Latin names of insects, which Nabokov knew perfectly as an entomologist. For example, in 1943, he actually discovered a new species of butterflies (later called Eupithecia nabokovi). Here, the research writer plays with Latin, which can be translated as "Yolk Lolita Nabokovskaya" - an unusual kind of butterfly, an elegant metaphor about the main character of the book, whose fate and personality Nabokov explores in the process of telling about Lolita.

This is the second and last English-language work by Nabokov, translated into Russian by the author himself. Nabokov wrote about his decision to do the translation himself as follows:
"It once occurred to me," at that moment I was looking at the colorful spines of translations of Lolita into languages I do not know—Japanese, Finnish or Arabic—that the list of inevitable mistakes in these fifteen or twenty versions would make, if put together, a volume thicker than any of them. Then I imagined something else. I imagined that in some distant future someone would take and publish a Russian version of Lolita. I tuned my inner telescope to this point in the distant future and saw that every paragraph, already full of traps, could be subjected to an ugly translation in its infidelity. In the hands of a malicious craftsman, the Russian version of Lolita could have completely degenerated, turned out to be tainted by vulgar retellings and blunders. And I decided to translate it myself. I have about sixty pages ready now."

In the USSR, the book was first published only during perestroika in 1989. Thus, despite the existing author's translation, the book could be officially read in the writer's homeland only twelve years after Nabokov's death.
This edition is notable for being the last edition of Lolita in Russian, printed during Nabokov's lifetime. Its circulation was only 200 copies.