When Lolita first appeared 70 years ago, in 1955, it was so controversial that no American publisher was willing to touch it. Today, Lolita is hailed as a classic, a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the English language.

Yet Lolita also comes with a sense that it is still, perhaps, too controversial to touch. A book about a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes his 12-year-old stepdaughter, all told in ravishing rainbow-streaked prose? “They’d never let you publish that now,” writer after writer has declared. In a development that seems almost too on the nose, it was recently reported that Jeffrey Epstein kept a prized first edition of the novel in his home, under glass.

“I love that book,” someone told me recently when he saw me rereading it. Then: “Am I still allowed to love that book?”

We certainly read Lolita very differently than we used to. For decades after its publication, readers both nodded to the horror at the center of the novel but also believed it was a little unsophisticated to dwell only on the assault. In pop culture, Lolita became synonymous with a teenaged seductress who deserves whatever she gets. Today, however, the received wisdom is that Lolita is not a romance but a horror story.

In the 70 years since its publication, Lolita — lovely, sensual Lolita; obscene, monstrous Lolita; bleak, tragic Lolita — has become a barometer of sorts for cultural change. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel is so multifaceted that it reflects the priorities of its readers back at us, showing us what we value and fear most at any given moment in time. We’re still arguing over Lolita today, and our debates mirror the contours of our current culture war: a horror at an abuser’s attempt to cover up their abuse; a terror that all that is pleasurable will be moralized into oblivion.

What kind of book could plausibly be experienced both as an erotic comic romp in the 1950s and a searing dismantling of rape culture on its 70th birthday? Only ever Lolita.

How did they ever publish Lolita?

Lolita was born a scandal.

Initially, Nabokov planned to publish the novel anonymously, with the only clue to his authorship the presence of a minor nonspeaking character whose name, Vivian Darkbloom, anagrammed to Vladimir Nabokov. But Lolita was so characteristic of Nabokov, with its dense wordplay, its butterfly motifs, its musical language, that Nabokov’s friends convinced him that everyone would know he wrote it anyway.

Four American publishers, likely fearing expensive obscenity lawsuits, turned down Lolita. Nabokov sent the manuscript went off to Paris’s Olympia Press, which knew how to publish obscene novels, and there it became an underground cult object: the book too scandalous to be published in the US, the literary novel from the pornographic publisher.

In 1958, when it finally came out in the US, it shot to the top of the bestseller lists and transformed Nabokov from an obscure Russian-born writer of tricky novels into a wealthy household name.

Not to say that Lolita is not a tricky novel. Lolita is narrated by one Humbert Humbert, a smooth-talking charmer who confesses to us early on that he is sexually obsessed with little girls between the ages of 8 and 14: “nymphets,” he calls them. His landlady’s 12-year-old daughter Dolores Haze — nicknamed Lolita by Humbert — is just one such nymphet, and Humbert is so obsessed with her that he decides to marry her mother in order to have more access to Dolores. After Mrs. Haze dies, Humbert seizes the moment to kidnap Dolores, taking her off on a demented road trip back and forth across America, going from one motel to the next, debauching her all the way.

Critics were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story.

Humbert is such a strange, unstable figure that the term “unreliable narrator” was coined in part to describe him. He narrates his depravities in luxuriant, beautiful sentences full of wordplay and neologisms, funny and mordant. He plays constantly for our sympathy: at one moment calling himself a monster, the next swearing he loves Lolita with a deep and undying passion, the next informing us with an air of triumph that it was she who seduced him. You can tell, reading Lolita, that Humbert wants you to like him. It’s harder to tell if Nabokov wants you to like Humbert, too.

Early critics by and large agreed that Lolita was a masterpiece (with some notable exceptions). But they were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story. How was anyone supposed to read it?

One of the most influential early readers who laid the........

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