venus febriculosa

The Lolita Cover Contest has ended and I want to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who took the plunge and participated. Your efforts made it so intriguing! In all, 105 entrants from 34 countries submitted a total of 155 entries (multiple entries being allowed). After the US and the UK, Poland and India had the most submissions with five each.

This was an extremely difficult exercise. There were interesting submissions on many different levels and it was quite wonderful to simultaneously review them all. In retrospect, however, I would not have limited the contest to one winner. I realized perhaps too late the inevitable arbitrary nature of this exercise and, forced to choose between conceptually different entries of equal merit, I developed my own rules in order to decide between them. My personal bias leans towards simple, elegant, graphically strong designs and typeface is important but remember that I am not a graphic designer.

In judging the submissions I tended to avoid lingerie, lollipops, roses, hearts, lipstick prints, butterflies, heart shaped sunglasses, and overtly sexual poses (as well as the unexpected recurring themes of swings and Rorschach blots) which by now have been indelibly linked to the cultural concept “Lolita” if not the novel itself. It’s important to keep in mind that the novel may be considered a love story, but it’s not Lolita who is in love.  And, of course, well beyond that one can explore the brutality and humor of the novel, the beauty of the prose and the cleverness of the wordplay. This is a tall order for a book cover, and of necessity draconian choices must be made.

I was able to narrow my selection to fifteen or so covers, from which I chose four that were conceptually quite different but all excellent.  Keep in mind that any of these could have been first place covers.

The first prize goes to Lyuba Haleva of Bulgaria for her wonderfully lyrical submission.

Although arguably anachronistic in its imagery and typeface, the use of Lolita (and Annabel?) as Humbert’s wings perfectly communicate the novel’s poetry and Humbert’s high-minded yet deluded pursuit of fantasy and art.  Since I felt this was a crucial component of the novel it ultimately edged out others that leaned towards a darker reading.

As runners up I chose covers by  Aleksander Bak of Poland, Derek McCalla of the United States, and Egor Krasnoperov of Russia (click on each cover for a larger image).

This reductive exercise by Aleksander Bak is sad, lurid, even funny. The lone unmoored pink scrunchy manages to be a potent symbol: surrounded by black, it’s s a memento mori representing Humbert’s loss of Lolita and the tragedy of the novel in general. Inevitably, of course, it’s also a stand in for an orifice (you decide whose and which one). The tension between the base and the sublime is wonderful and the composition is wonderful.

Derek McCalla’s image is shocking, almost radical. I see it as a witness to Humbert’s destruction of Lolita’s childhood through narcissistic acts of manipulation. In many ways it’s a grim book (let’s not forget that practically everyone dies). Interestingly, Chris Pritchett, McCalla’s instructor at Virginia Tech used this contest as an exercise for his screenprinting class which is offered through the university’s architecture department and populated by first-year though fifth-year architecture students. I asked Pritchett why he had chosen to use this as an assignment:

“I felt this was a good project for architecture students because as a graphic exercise they are forced to convey a wide range of emotion through one image.”

Egor Krasnoperov cleverly and humorously gives us a triple-entendre, at least the way I see this. First of course, there is the lollipop theme, present in all its banality, but rendered here beautifully and naively; then the circle that censors Lolita’s crotch, and, finally, the hypnotic vortex into which Humbert has fallen and which, quite literally, centers on Lolita’s sexuality. Pretty wonderful for such a minimal image.

John Gall, vice president and art director at Vintage/Anchor Books and designer of the latest cover of Lolita (see samples of his work here), kindly agreed to review the submissions and picked his own top choices. His favorite is by Suzene Ang of Singapore:

“It takes a second before you see what is going on. It’s abstract enough to keep it metaphorical, yet literal enough to imply a sense of story. I love the tease of having the type run up the leg. Elegant, with a sense of humor.”

He also liked the Aleksander Bak cover that was one of my top choices:

“For second place I like the simplicity of the hair scrunchy design. Nice double entendre. I worry though, that it might be too much of a contemporary reference.”

Gall made a point a few times of stressing the difficulty of the task:

“This is a tough assignment. So many clichéd images to either avoid or make new. Not an easy task.  I teach a cover design class and wouldn’t give this as an assignment in a million years!”

I also asked Barbara Bloom to weigh in, an artist whose Nabokov-themed work has involved the use of existing Lolita book covers in addition to designing her own, not only for Lolita, but also much of the Nabokov ouevre :

“As a matter of principle, I rejected all of the: (sucking) lollypop remakes, lurid images of young girls, underwear, heart shaped anythings. I have chosen a few covers not so much for their style of rendering, or excellence in typographic or design strategies. These are covers that seem to have a more complex and psychological reading of the text.”

She selected as her favorite an entry by Lucie Lebaz of the UK (in fact she liked three by Lebaz):

“Like that they form ONE body together. And LOVE the pink triangle.”

Above is Bloom’s own cover. Susan Tallman, in her essay in the artist’s monograph, writes:

“Most remarkable, however, is the absurdly apropos silhouette BB found for the cover of Lolita: the pompous (and paunchy) Nabokovian male at the lectern, the saucy stance of the little girl (the word ‘minx’ seems almost unavoidable) who thrusts her hip at his tendentious fingers. One does wonder what other purpose the image could ever have served.”

Addendum: Bloom also listed Aleksander Bak’s scrunchy cover among her favorites. Since we all liked his fantastic cover he will be awarded a special prize.

You can find all of the entries here: Lolita Submissions

And a list of all entrants including state and country: Entrants List

Now, shall we make this an annual contest? Let me know…

The contest will end at 11:59pm Friday October 2.

http://www.slate.com/id/2229224/pagenum/all

This is getting pretty far afield, but I just love this cover. Not that house music has anything to do with this blog.

Here’s something a little different: the score of the piano reduction of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera Lolita.  A contemporary Lolita is pictured on the cover, complete with lizard tatoo, navel piercing and cargo belt.

Continuing our Lolita book cover theme I am grateful to Barbara Bloom for providing this image of her 1998 work Lolita Stamps (you can find her design among them) as well as this quote by Susan Tallman from the retrospective catalogue The Collections of Barbara Bloom:

“BB was drawn to the relentless precision of Nabokov’s prose, and also to the manner in which that relentlessness resulted, not in difficult avant-gardism, but in flat out beauty. (The terrifying thing about Lolita is that it is simultaneously so repugnant and so beautiful.) Like the obsessive lover who seeks to re-dress the object of his desire in the clothes he wants to see her in, BB set about designing her own covers for most (not all) of Nabokov’s novels, quite often by gracing them with prior work of her own: Glory (1932) bears the image of BB’s Pride on its cover, and a chain of Nabokov’s beloved butterfly wings from Never Odd or Even: Corner on the back; Invitation to a Beheading (1938) is adorned with two of BB’s museum photographs: the Greek horse head from the British Museum and another of a bit of Classical statuary truncated by the intrusion of a large red hat. The simplest and most straightforward is Despair, with its black-and-white documentation of BB’s broken porcelain KPM Arkadia dinner plate. Most remarkable, however, is the absurdly apropos silhouette BB found for the cover of Lolita: the pompous (and paunchy) Nabokovean male at the lectern, the saucy stance of the little girl (the word minx seems almost unavoidable) who thrusts her hip at his tendentious fingers. One does wonder what other purpose the image could ever have served.”

 I am hopeful that in the not too distant future I will be able to ask her a few questions about her art, her interest in Nabokov, her collection of books from his personal library and, of course, what Humbert is doing with those scissors!

For those for whom the subject matter of Lolita is just too unsettling, look no further than Lolita, Scrubbed by Gerard Kibbey. In the scrubber’s own words:

“Welcome. Perhaps you’re here because you and I share a love for the wit and poetry found in Nabokov’s classic, Lolita. For a book fan, Lolita is a trove of voice, alliteration, character, plot, assonance, and mood. It’s chock-full of references and culture. But—and for the morally discriminating reader, there’s always that but—it’s the account of a child rapist, told with fluctuating, insufficient remorse. The narrator’s moral depravity left this reader unsatisfied and I doubt I am alone.

My solution: put on my editor hat go to work, creating an alternate edition of Nabokov’s masterwork, Lolita, Scrubbed. In this new (and I hope, improved) version, I seek to retain the lovable poetry of the book’s original text while excising the book’s amoral core. And while I make no claims to be a writer of Nabokov’s caliber, I plan to “re-see” troubling scenes as the author would, were he convinced of the novel’s problematic nature. I also plan, in an effort to make the book more “of our times,” to apply light cuts here and there in areas where I feel the language goes a little overboard.”

I think it’s quite clear that Kibbey’s misguided effort belies a laughably profound misunderstanding of the novel, but I won’t get into that just yet. For now, I leave this for your amusement:

http://lolitascrubbed.blogspot.com/2009/06/foreward_08.html

After stage and screen adaptations, how about a musical interpretation of the novel and its novelist? Viennese composer and trumpeter Franz Koglmann has a new recording, inspired in large part by just that. Using a motif from composer Bob Harris’ “Love Theme” taken from the score of Kubrick’s 1962 film Koglmann’s “dynamically detached chamber jazz”  creates a sonic tribute not only to Lolita, but also to other Nabokov works, with titles such as Ada and Van, Vadim Vadimowitsch N., Laura, Just Half a Shade and Martha Dreyer. Past albums by Koglmann include similar treatments of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound:

“Through intimate musical articulation—orchestrating images and clever intellectual references into playful and provocative word sonatas—it was inevitable that Koglmann would choose to decipher the challenging linguistic maneuvers of world-famous writer Vladimir Nobokov, known as the master of “chamber music in prose,” into a set of musical images.”

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=34071

Listen to clips from the album on the col legno website:

http://www.col-legno.com/

“It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a twelve-year-old Lolita. She only existed in my head. But to make a real twelve-year-old girl play such a part would be sinful and immoral, and I will never consent to it.”

Well, of course Nabokov did consent to it, once for $150,000 and 15% of the producer’s profits for the movie rights (not to mention his fee for the screenplay) and then again for the musical, for which he waived script approval (and probably any serious interest in the project as well).

It’s still startling to me that in 1971 John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner contributed words and music to a musical of Lolita, called Lolita My Love. Not surprisingly, it was savaged by the critics and closed before its scheduled Broadway opening after only nine performances in Philadelphia and Boston. In 1981 Edward Albee took his chances with a non-musical stage adaptation that was even more disastrously received. It’s not hard to wonder why. 

In 2007 a funny letter appeared in the New York Times in response to an article on novels being made into musicals:

To the Editor:

I am sorry that Henry Alford (”Books on Broadway,” Jan. 14), was not able to see ”Lolita, My Love” when it opened in Philadelphia in 1971 (or when it closed in Boston shortly thereafter). The sight and sound of the incomparable Dorothy Loudon belting out ”Sur les Quais de Ramsdale, Vermont” made an unforgettable memory for me. Curiously, audiences had pretty much the reaction that Max Bialystock hoped for with ”Springtime for Hitler.”

Carol Clapp
West Hartford, Conn.

Carol Clapp! That song is at the bottom of this post. Judge for yourself:

But even more obscure is the 1994 world premiere in Stockholm of Rodion Shchedrin’s three-hour opera of Lolita (in Swedish) conducted by none other than the great Mstislav Rostropovich and attended by Nabokov’s son and translator Dmitri. Incidentally Shchedrin was married to prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya for whom he created several ballets, including Anna Karenina and The Little Humpbacked Horse. The opera was well received, and Act II is still occasionally performed.  The image below is like no opera I’ve ever seen!

Perusing this publisher’s website, it’s apparent that book cover design is not their strong suit. That being said, I am fascinated by this cover of the Hebrew translation of Lolita. The skeletal image of Lolita looks like it was hijacked from an Egon Schiele drawing or worse. Is this Lolita as anorexia sufferer or concentration camp prisoner? It’s a haunting image to be sure and, given what the poor girl was subjected to, perhaps entirely appropriate. Many covers choose to concentrate on Lolita’s innocence and even physical attractiveness, but this is the embodiment of her torment, a naked, skin and bone, practically bald Lolita, with unseeing eyes like a mask from a Greek tragedy, stripped bare in every way. That would have been enough. The Andy Warhol Coke bottles, now that’s just ridiculous.

http://www.newlibrary.co.il/Htmls/product.aspx?c0=13151&bsp=12839