Language is what matters in Lolita (1955/1958), according to Nabokov, and it is also what my ‘exilic’ reading of the novel will focus on. In his 1956 postscript, Nabokov describes Lolita as ‘the record of my love affair’ with the English language rather than with the romantic novel (LO: 316). His love declaration can be taken to allude to the fact that Lolita came to mark his arrival as an American author, even though the manuscript had initially been rejected by US publishers for fear of prosecution. The novel became a succès de scandale through its publication, in 1955, by Olympia Press, a publisher of erotic literature based in Paris, before it appeared in 1958 in the US. In the Russian émigré circles in Europe, Nabokov had already achieved fame as a renowned author of nine novels and numerous short stories. The shift from Russian to English in his writing and the transatlantic move in 1940 not only meant that he had to find an entirely new audience among American readers, but he also felt compelled to discover a new cultural world. ‘It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe’, Nabokov writes describing the challenge of his two literary careers, ‘and now I was faced with the task of inventing America’ (LO: 312). Indeed, the three novels that make up his ‘American trilogy’, Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire (Wood 1997: 162), are firmly grounded in his re-invention of American culture.