''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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granting that the Bolshevist and the Nazi-German re-
gimes have to a certain degree acted as "models" of
the world of the novel, yet warns the reader not to
see this same novel as directly concerned with either
of the two states:
the influence
...
of my epoch on my present
book is as negligible as the influence of
my books, or at least of this book, on my
5
epoch.
He is even more outspoken in his Foreword to Invitation
to
a Beheading:
The question whether or not my seeing both
[the Bolshevist regime and the Nazi regime]
in terms of one dull beastly farce had any
effect on this book, should concern the
good reader as little as it does me. 6
He does not always express his view quite so direct-
ly. It is true that he is very explicit about Lolita:
I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic7
fiction,... and Lolita has no moral
in tow
,
but he made this statement only after'Lolita had been
thoroughly misunderstood despite the Foreword by'John
Ray. This Foreword is a good example of how Nabokov
integrates his view of art into the very art itself.
John Ray's insistence on "the ethical impact the
book should have on the serious reader", that "in this
poignant study there lurks a general lesson", and that
"Lolita' should make all of us - parents, social
workers, educators - apply ourselves with still greater
vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a bet-
ter generation in a safer world"8 expresses a view
that is diametrically opposed to all of Nabokov's_prin-
ciples, and in the light of, these principles the whole