Humbert Humbert, a thirty-seven-year-old teacher of French literature, has an extraordinary penchant for nymphet, as he calls them, for charming girls from nine to fourteen. A long childhood impression endowed him with this underground experience, averting from more mature women. The confession novel, written by Humbert, who is in prison, dates back to the summer of 1947. Ten years earlier, while living in Paris, he was married, but his wife left him for the sake of a Russian emigrant colonel just before he moved to America. There he took part in various research projects, was treated for melancholy in sanatoriums, and, having left the next hospital, rented a house in Madame Charlotte Haze in New England. The mistress of Dolores has twelve-year-old daughter Lau, Lolita, a reminder of that childhood love of Humbert, the loss of which gave his erotic life such a strange direction.

Humbert checks the pages of his diary about the longing lust for Lolita, when he suddenly finds out that her mother sends her to a summer camp. Charlotte writes a letter to Humbert, which declares his love for him, and demands to leave her house if he does not share her feelings. After some hesitation, Humbert accepts the proposal "to move from tenants to cohabitants." He marries his mother, not for a moment forgetting about his future stepdaughter. From now on, nothing will prevent him from communicating with her. However, it turns out that after the wedding, Charlotte intends to send Lolita immediately after the camp to a boarding house, and then to Beardsley College. Humbert's plans are crumbling. While swimming in a forest lake, he wants to drown his wife, but cannot, unfortunately, having learned that an artist neighbor is watching them from the hill.

Mrs. Humbert finds and reads her husband's diary and completely exposes him. While he is feverishly considering how to get out of this situation, Charlotte in tears and anger runs across the road to send letters and gets under the car.

After the wife’s funeral, the hero goes for Lolita. Having got hold of clothes for her and sleeping pills, he informs the girl that her mother is in the hospital on the eve of a serious operation. Having taken Lolita from the camp, Humbert is going to take her to towns and hotels. In the first of them, he gives the girl sleeping pills to enjoy her sleeping. Sleeping pills do not work. Humbert’s night of torment and indecision, who does not dare to touch Lolita, ends with her morning awakening and seduction of her stepfather. To the amazement of the latter, Lolita was not a virgin; more recently, she “tried” it with the son of the head of the camp.

Intimacy changes Humbert's relationship with Lolita. He discovers that her mother is dead. Since August 1947, they travel throughout the United States throughout the year, changing motels, cottages, and hotels. The hero tries to bribe the girl with a promise of various pleasures and threatens troubles if she extradites him to the police as a seducer. Numerous sights of the country open before travelers. In parallel, scandals occur between them. Paradise bliss does not promise stable happiness. Instead of hiding somewhere in Mexico, Humbert turns east of America to send the girl to a private gymnasium in Beardsley.

January 1, 1949 Lolita turns fourteen years old. She already partially loses the charm of her nymphetism, her vocabulary is becoming unbearable. She demands money from Humbert for the satisfaction of his special desires, hides them so that, as he suspects, having accumulated, he will escape from him. In the gymnasium, she begins to get involved in theater.While rehearsing the play Enchanted Hunters, Lolita falls in love with its author, the famous playwright Quilty, the irresistible hero of the advertising cigarette Dromedary. Sensing something was wrong, Humbert takes Lolita from Beardsley a week before the premiere.

In the summer of 1949, their last trip to America begins. Humbert is haunted by suspicions of her betrayal. He is afraid to leave Lolita for a long time alone, checks the gun, which he stores in the box. Once he notices a cherry Cadillac following them in the distance. Did someone hire a detective to keep track of them? What is this bald gentleman with whom Lolita was hurriedly talking? On the road in the towns, they watch the plays of some Quilty and Damor Block. Their pursuer changes cars, some actors are found in the cherry Cadillac. Lolita tricks Humbert, leads him by the nose along with accomplices of her new lover.

In Elphinstone, Lolita is taken to the hospital with high fever. For the first time in two years, Humbert was separated from his beloved. Then he gets sick too. When he is going to pick up Lolita from the hospital, it turns out that the day before she left with her “uncle”.

Three and a half years pass without Lolita. First, Humbert rides in the reverse order in the wake of his inventive rival. In the fall, he reaches Beardsley. Until next spring, treated in a sanatorium. Then he meets a thirty-year-old naive, tender and brainless girlfriend named Rita, who saved Humbert from a straitjacket. He teaches at Cantrip University. And finally he ends up in New York, where on September 22, 1952 he receives a letter from Lolita. She reports that she is married, that she is expecting a child, that she needs money to pay off her debts, as her husband is going with her to Alaska, where he is promised a job.

Humbert determines the address by stamp and, taking the gun with him, sets off on the road. He finds Lolita in a shack on the outskirts of a small town married to an almost deaf war veteran. She finally reveals the name of her seducer: this is the playwright Claire Quilty, a depraved genius who is very indifferent to small children. She thought Humbert had figured it out long ago. Quilty, having stolen her, drove to the ranch, assuring that he would be lucky in the fall to try on the role in Hollywood. But there, Lolita was waiting for drunkenness, drugs, perversions and group orgies, in which she refused to take part, and was thrown out into the street. Further hard living for a living, meeting with a future husband ...

Humbert offers Lolita to leave her husband immediately with him, she refuses, she never loved him. Humbert gives her and her husband four thousand dollars — income from her late mother’s house — and goes hunting for playwright Claire Quilty.

He feels a bit of remorse for Lolita. Humbert returns to Ramzdel, where he lived with Charlotte, transfers all the property in the name of Lolita, finds out the address of Quilty.

Then he goes to Parkington, where he penetrates the ancestral castle of his enemy, and with a pistol in his hands conducts a half-crazy conversation with him, alternating with shots, misfires, misses, hits, a fight between two elderly and dilapidated bodies, reading the verdict in verse. All this makes the scene of vengeance farcical. Quilty runs away from his executioner, he shoots him ... The next guests of Quilty appear in the house, drink his vodka, not paying attention to the statement of Humbert that he killed their master. At this time, a bloodied Quilty crawls out onto the upper platform, where he “fiddled heavily, clapping fins; but soon ... froze - now forever. " Humbert leaves the castle.

“Lolita”, his confession, he writes first in a psychiatric hospital where his mind is checked, and then in prison awaiting trial, before he dies of a heart attack. Shortly after Humbert, Lolita also dies, resolving herself on Christmas Day 1952 as a dead girl.