lolita

I fully concur with Lionel Trilling and contemporary critic James Kincaid that the largely
satirical metaphor Nabokov created is spearheaded with his laughter at
the peculiar sexual hypocrisy of American life… the perpetual publicity we give to
sexuality, the unending invitation made by our popular art and advertising to sexual
awareness, competence and competition. To what end is a girl-child taught from her
earlier years to consider the brightness and fragrance of her hair, and the shape of her
body, and her look of readiness for adventure? (Trilling 2000, 364)
Kincaid, writing in late 2008, echoes Trilling:
John Hollander, in Partisan Review, wrote, "Lolita ... flames with a tremendous
perversity." Possibly, but there's no doubt that the American public does. We have, for
the past 200 or so years, progressively eroticized, put at the very heart of our
constructions of the desirable, the young body, the innocent, the unspoiled. Rather than
facing this head-on, we have manufactured a variety of scapegoats: day-care center
operators, Roman Catholic priests, kiddie-porn rings, Internet predators. Meanwhile, we
go right along, parading before us all the JonBenet Ramseys we can find: Shirley Temple,
Deanna Durbin, Patty McCormick, Brooke Shields, Drew Barrymore, the Olsen twins
(Kincaid 2008).
In other words, the novel can indeed be read as a satirical jab at the “sexual hypocrisy” of the US
society, especially with regard to (pre)pubescent girls, but Trilling suggests that at the same time
Nabokov’s main purpose was to write a “story about love” (Trilling 2000, 364). Humbert’s
“passion-love” (to use Trilling’s key term) for Lolita is, in addition, a Euro-American affair as
the novel’s plot is built around the relationship between a West European intellectual and an
American teenager.
Nabokov was born and raised in Russia during the Silver Age. Much of his career was
spent in and closely linked to the émigré world of Paris and Berlin between the two world wars.
Prior to moving to the US, he wrote almost exclusively in Russian. It is therefore imperative to
summarize possible Russian sources and forerunners of the novel. Establishing this continuity
will enable me to argue that Lolita is in many ways an apogee in the development of post-Silver
Age / modern literary discourses of sex and eroticism. At the same time, these lines of continuity
may also be instrumental in understanding the limits and the pitfalls of Nabokov’s erotic
imagination, i.e., to what extent those could be defined by his “Russianness.” Although the
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