Readers, maybe publicly interested in the avant-garde, maybe privately interested in the erotic parts, flocked to buy it. Critics and reviewers responded to the book’s beautiful glittering surface and its dark, subversive interior, its confusing shape and its transgressive morality, represented the world of the modern. Courts were disinclined to fly in the face of such a united outcry of support. Nabokov’s narrative, which was both literary and erotic, provided the perfect challenge to these rigid Victorian prohibitions. The contemporary laws against pornography were widespread and powerful. The publisher, Maurice Girodias, wrote hopefully that he thought the book was “not only admirable from the literary point of view, but also might lead to change in social attitudes toward the kind of love described in Lolita”-that is, the love of pedophilia and serial rape.

But for the subject matter, it would have been a succ ès d’estime, admired but little-known: it was the scandalous, forbidden sex that created a huge storm of interest. But the real reason it received such enormous attention was the sexual content: it was the book about the pedophile, the man who has sex with his step-daughter. The book was hailed as a masterpiece for its inventiveness, its questions of authorship and narrator, its layers and complexity, its linguistic high-jinks, its trickery and cleverness and glittering word-play. The furor crested on a wave of prurient excitement over the possibility of sexually explicit material entering the literary mainstream. Lolita was a succ ès de scandale when it came out 60 years ago this month from Olympia Press, with a first print run of 5,000 (Graham Greene called it “one of the three best books of 1955”). So, if he’s a genius, what is his masterpiece? His stylistic brilliance, the intricacy of his post-modern narratives, his glittering mastery of two great languages, the brooding depth of his intellect and his prolific output all elevate him above most other contemporary writers. It is a fact universally acknowledged that Vladimir Nabokov is a genius.

Instal the new Lolita