An unabridged Chinese version of Lolita, written by Russian-born American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, was published and put on sale nationwide on Wednesday by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House.

It is the first complete Chinese version of the original novel. The Chinese Lolita book now has 350,000 characters, with translation by Zhu Wan, alias Ye Zhi, who died in 2004, said sources at the publisher.

Lolita, first published in 1955 in Paris, tells the story of a middle-aged man, who falls in love with a 12-year-old girl and marries her sick, widowed mother to satisfy his erotic desires. Hemolests the girl in a Riviera hotel while she's asleep, she wakens and he runs into the traffic and dies. The novel shocked many people but its humor and literary style were praised by critics. Soon after publication, it was banned for its controversial content.

A dozen Chinese versions of the novel have been published since summer 1989 when the novel was first translated into Chinese, but all with abridgements.

In 2004, the Shanghai Translation Publishing House won exclusive rights for translating and publishing Lolita and other works by Mr. Nabokov in China, said the publisher sources, adding it would publish Chinese versions of Mr. Nabokov's eight to ten novels or prose collections by May this year.

(Xinhua News Agency January 20, 2006)