The Nabokov Question

Mixed reaction to my posting of Nabokov. I see both sides.

Question from Margaret Langlois:

”Celia, I'm wondering what you're trying to tell us with this about Vladimir Nabokov, who is most well known for his world famous novel "Lolita", about an old man lusting after a young girl. Didn't that contribute to fueling the rampant pedophile craze? What would Dr. Judith Reisman say about him? He's also seen here as an uber privileged rich guy living on a lake in Switzerland who has a dutiful wife to do his typing, oh and he has a way with words. Please clarify where you're going with this! Thank you.”

Answer: This is a valid criticism and I was aware that I went against myself in many ways by posting it.

I was actually looking at material about Yevgeny Yevtushenko last night, in a trauma state, after a rough day, trying to locate his poem about his friend, Robert F. Kennedy after the assassination, then came upon the fact that Joseph Brodsky “hated” him, (Yevtushenko,) got curious, started listening to Brodsky clips. I learned that John Steinbeck had said Yevtushenko was a communist and would never change, (this was the “rabbit hole”) and the algorithm sent me that clip from Nabokov. I was always opposed to him for the reasons you mention.

It seems, as per this text, his conduct toward children was, throughout his life, “unimpeachable,” which leaves then, the “mystery” as I call it, namely what he meant to express, in Lolita.

And whether one can be fiercely opposed to pedophilia and still interested in things Nabokov said, thought and wrote. It’s a valid question.

Not exactly reassuring..

A novel centers on a character with beastly characteristics. Lolita, for example. Is the author glorifying his crimes? Was Dostoyevsky at heart an ax murderer? And so on.

I’m not steeped in this dialectic, not very knowledgeable, except I have urged total rejection of figures like Ginsberg and Burroughs on grounds of unrepentant pedophilia, which I learned the depths of from Mickey Z’s writings.

The simple truth is that I began listening (despite my aversion to Nabokov due to Lolita) and was pulled in by what he said about having a father who was so fluent as a speaker and feeling inferiors etc. This endeared me to him, and I kept listening. Why didn’t I state that I object to his creation of the novel Lolita? Likely I was disarmed because he so strongly denounced Freud, the original, sort of proto-cultural father of the pedophile revolution. I was grateful for that, and then I just thought, well, he said these things, just put it up without a big apologetic essay.

Maybe that was a mistake, but I hope it doesn’t express any disrespect for the work of Dr. Judith Reisman. She was doing something quite different—she was a supreme whistleblower who gave her life to expose a deep and threatening rotten root infecting our whole society, namely Kinsey.

Here’s Nabokov’s Wikipedia page.

The What They Said series will continue, and is intended to be just like this—open and vivid dialogue around what people said.

I am a big believer in the power of the quoted word, language itself, I always want to hear what people have to say. It seems to me the New Age movement stopped people from speaking, as people.

The New Age era was, among other things, a frontal attack on the very notion of candor in human speech. That era was when speech began to become watered down, generic, and harmless. And we fell into great danger because of it.

I am drawn to people who don’t seek admiration when they speak or write.