[Paracelsus]

(06-23-2017 02:26 AM)stugatz Wrote:  

Nabokov was an open conservative, wasn't he? And the irony is that most Lolita fans I've run into are liberals who feel sorry for Humbert Humbert.

This would be the same brand of irony that it was lefties who went out and made Orwell's 1984 a bestseller again.

As it is, Nabokov wrote in his afterword that there apparently is no moral to the story. That is a signal to distrust the book, it's the same horseshit "just the tip" rationale for child pornography that Una tries to hide under. But at least Lolita hides behind an unreliable narrator, which tells the reader Humbert is lying to us, which tells us he's an arsehole rationalising child abuse to himself. Una does not do that.

Nabokov in America backed Nixon. He was against communism, fascism, and the Tsars while he was in Russia, and his father was one of the most prominent Jewish activists in Russia. His politics don't excuse him: he wrote the prototype text for the humanisation of paedophilia, and it tells you how far as a society we have fallen in seventy years that what once basically rebounded off society is now penetrating deep into it.