VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S Lolita, that disquieting story about a suave and silver-tongued European emigre who seduces a 12-year-old American girl, was published 50 years ago this year. Lolita is unlike most controversial books in that its edge has not dulled over time. Where Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, say, now seem familiar and inoffensive, almost quaint, Nabokov's masterpiece is, if anything, more disturbing than it used to be.

The book did not come out in the US until 1958. Nabokov finished it in December 1953 and, according to the biography by Brian Boyd, sent it to five American publishers: Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Doubleday and Farrar, Straus. None would touch it, and neither would The New Yorker, with whom Nabokov had a first-reading agreement.

Katharine White, Nabokov's editor at the magazine and a friend, told him that Lolita made her "thoroughly miserable". Pascal Covici, his editor at Viking, said that anyone who published it risked being fined or jailed.

The anniversary we are celebrating is that of the Paris edition, a green-jacketed book that came out under the grimy imprint of the Olympia Press, which had cornered a lucrative niche by publishing books that ran into censorship trouble elsewhere, including titles by Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

They gave the press a certain literary cachet, though most of its titles were along the lines of Until She Screams and There's a Whip in My Valise.

Nabokov initially planned to publish Lolita pseudonymously, though he left a tell-tale fingerprint: mention of a character named Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. But James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions, argued that the book's style was so distinctive, no one would stay fooled, and when Maurice Girodias, Olympia's publisher, urged the author to use his own name, Nabokov gave in.

Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, claimed to have turned out the manuscript in just 56 days, and the book reads that way - the hot, urgent, at times lyrical outpourings of a man blurting out a simultaneous confession and self-justification.

The task took Nabokov considerably longer, and in 1950, "beset with technical difficulties and doubts", he even started to burn the manuscript in a backyard incinerator, from which it was saved by his wife, Vera