2: Volodya Takes America

The book detailed the memoir of European pedophile Humbert. Humbert Hu, Nabukov referred to in later interviews as quote, a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching and Dolores Lolita Hayes, a twelve year old American girl. He becomes obsessed with, abducts and rapes hundreds of times over the course of several years. The novel takes the perspective of Humbert, who is trying to convince you, the reader and his jury,

that this is a love story. Nabokov would later say that the humbrid character was inspired by an ape who learned to draw. Nabokov says this the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin de Plance, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing every charcoal by an animal. This sketch showed the bars of the

poor creature's cage. Nabokov constructed Humbard's drawing of his own cage on index cards in the summers between teaching at Cornell University. He right in the back seat of the car after long days of his wife Vera, driving them from the east to west coast of the United States, stopping in motels that Nabokov used as inspiration on where Humbert brings Lalita after kidnapping her, trailing the quote sinuous

trail of slime unquote, as Nabokov describes. A legend has it that Vera once caught him trying to destroy the manuscript and stopped him right in time. Not to mention, this wasn't even the first time he'd attempted to write about this theme or destroyed that attempt. Nabokov had written a novella called The Enchanter while living in the Russian emigrant community in Berlin nine very similar storyline, but Nabulkov destroys all copies of the story he thinks, before it's

ever published. But now it's the end of ninety three and the Bookov's work is complete. He wants to publish it under a pseudonym. At first, worried that the themes of the book would lose him his teaching job at Cornell, whose income he was still very dependent on at this time, but he's advised that this would make it even less likely that Lolita would be published at all, and in fact, could be used to make him look guilty in a

court of law if things went that far. Because this is still towards the end of the McCarthy era in the US, Nabokov wasn't the untouchable writer he's regarded as today at this time. In fact, Lolita's success would turn him into that. And it's not like there's no established precedent for books landing authors and publishers in court, no

matter how well regarded the work is. James Joyce's Ulysses ran into censorship issues back in the twenties during its pre publication serialization in the US, leading to the United States Versus One book called Ulysses case of three very dramatic case name. The book went out, but not before a lot of money was spent on both sides, and similar situations had befallen erotic novel Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor, as well as to Nabokov's friend, American writer Edmund Wilson's

Memoirs of Heckate County in the fifties. All of these books end up prevailing in the courts, but the process was arduous and expensive on publishers, and many didn't want to take the financial and reputational risk, even on a writer they really liked. So Lolita is sent to American publishers, to Viking, to Simon and Schuster, to New Directions Double Day, and it's a resounding now across the board. Simon and

Schuster says it's sheer pornography. Nabokov writes to his longtime editor Katherine White at The New Yorker, who also has rejected Lowlit to at this point, saying the following, I had to write that book for artistic reasons, and I don't really care much what happens to it next. But it turns out he does care because then it's on

to the British publishers, but still no luck. In early nineteen fifty five, still searching, he writes this to Edmund Wilson, I suppose it will be published by some shady firm with a Viennese dream name e g. Silo, And in April nineteen fifty five it reaches Olympia Press in Paris, run by Mario Gerodius. Olympia was famous for two things, publishing controversial scraps by famous writers like Miller, Beckett and Boroughs that they couldn't release elsewhere, and erotica porn book porn.

It was book porn, and Gerodius accepted the title of Mr. Book porn with quote joy and pride end quote, and hey, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of book porn. That's not how I would classify Lolita the book at all, but the genre of erotica itself. I mean, who cares.

I'll tell you who cares. It's Vladimir Nabokov. Reflecting on this time later, he says this, I had not been in Europe since nineteen forty, was not interested in pointo graphic books, and thus knew nothing about the obscene novelettes, would Mr Gerodius was hiring hacks to confect with assistants. I have pondered the painful question whether I would have agreed so cheerfully to his publishing Lolita had I been a wearer in May nineteen fifty five of what formed

the supple backbone of his production. Alas, I probably would the less cheerfully. And he's right. Gerodius, in spite of giving Lolita the first of its many breaks that would turn it into a classic, did not get it and was quoted as saying it quote might bring about a change in social attitudes towards the kind of love described unquote, which was, as you know, definitely not the point of

the book. To put it generously, The book of American academic friends advise him not to publish, thinking it will damage his reputation. There's a little bit of drama with copyright between the author and Olympia, and in September nineteen fifty five, Lolita's first edition is published and everyone loves it. No notes the end, just kidding. This is Lolita Podcast. Welcome back. I'm Jamie Loftus. Nice to paras socially interact

with you again. Here on Lolita Podcast. Last week in our first episode, we talked about some of the current prevalent schools of thought on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and took an in depth look at the events of the book itself, because there's no use in knowing what happens in the adaptations if you don't know what you're comparing it against. And it goes without saying that. We have a lot

to talk about. But today we're going to take it back in time a little bit to talk about nabokof to talk to several of the scholars in the Nabokov community, to talk about some of the finer points of the book, and to trace the journey of the book's first publication in nineteen fifty five, through the long battle of Lolita as a band book, all the way up to the

first film adaptation attempt in the early nineteen sixties. Brian Boyd, who has written the definitive two volume of Nabokov biography that I've been using, and we're also going to be talking to Brian in this episode as well. So, my friends, the time has come to ask who is Vladimir Nabokov. He is born on April twenty second, eighteen ninety nine in St. Petersburg to a very wealthy Russian noble family. But his family does require some explaining, so we're going

to take it back a little bit before that. Nabokov's grandfather, Dmitri Nabokov is high up in the pre revolutionary government. He's the Minister of Justice under the liberal Ish Czar's Alexander's two and three. He is a bureaucratic liberal. But even this was enough to get labeled as a radical every once in a while. Think of how people called Joe Biden a radical when he was running, and it's like, honey,

I wish uh sorry for getting political. Moving on, Dmitri is considered radical for saying wild things like there should be fair trials for all. His writer grandson would actually continue this line of thought later in his life, saying that he pitied both JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald after watching media coverage of the president's assassination in the US

in the nineteen sixties. Dmitri Nabokov is prominent in pre revolutionary Russia and then a buck Offs have a number of brushes, but literary fame before the famous novelist in the family is born. Dmitri encounters writer and founder of socialist realism Nikolai Schernishevski, who under Alexander was intimidated by being mock executed but then told just kidding, You're not being executed, but get out, and then he was exiled.

And there's a bunch of this in pre revolutionary Russia. Anyways, Dmitri has an affair with an older woman and then marries her daughter to keep things above board. And the woman he marries is Vladimir Nabokov's grandmother, but she's also Vladimir Nabokov's mother because Vladimir Nabokov and his father have the exact same name, which becomes messy for the author and for me right now. So to differentiate, I am going to call the father of Lowlit to author Vladimir Nabakov,

Daddy Vlad to make things easier, thank you. That is a very elegant solution. I was in mensa, so Daddy Vlad pretty cool guy born in eighteen seventy. His politics are pretty far to the left of his father, Dmitri. He's arrested as a student protester he was outspoken against anti Semitism and went on to be a successful defender of Russian Jews. During his legal career. He also defended

queer people, ex convicts, and political insurgents from legal oppression. Overall, I would have dated him, but he was still from a bougie family, and he marries accordingly. Daddy Vlad marries Elena rukov Shnakova, daughter of landowners so rich her dad opened a school for only his kids. Elena is very intelligent and is educated in the natural sciences. They're married and have five kids, the oldest of whom is Vladimir Nabokov,

or Volodia as he's known as a kid. Daddy Vlad starts working as an editor at Provo, a left leaning journal, and Volodia is pretty uninterested in politics as a young person.

He has another brush with literary fame. A young Volodia and Daddy Vlad meat writer Leo Tolstoy, Hello in passing when Volodia is only ten, and here I'll be honest, Vladimir Nabokov sounds like an absolute braddy rich kid while he's growing up, and Nabokov scholars will defend this, but Yeah, he's very bright, but he seems like kind of a jerk. He had like valet Is driving him to school. It's

not for me. Very spoiled by his parents, Volodia had nanny's and private tutors and literally teethed on his mother's jewels growing up. For reference, he's about the same age as the Romanov Children's Anastasia to all those so he wasn't royalty, but that same time and that same vibe like teething on jewels, A cocky, rich kid. Nabokov speaks Russian, English and French from a young age, and later says this of himself in his autobiography, speak memory. I think

I was born like that. A precocious genius and humble too. Volodia is also diagnosed with synesthesia as a kid, a condition where letters and numbers are associated with colors, and that's something that his eventual wife, Vera will share Daddy. Vlad is elected into the first Duma Council in nineteen o six, but then is sent to prison and solitary confinement in nineteen o eight for his association with the Provo Journal. He comes back find but Volodia remembers this

time very clearly. Nabokov has four younger siblings, one of whom is a childhood friend to iron Rand, which I don't want to talk about at all, and one of which is his brother Sergei, which I do as Volodia does something both pretty unforgivable and very of his time and outs his brother as a gay man to their parents, which results in Sergey's being sent away to a boarding school.

The relationship doesn't completely heal for some time, and Sergey, after many happy years with his lover, dies in a concentration camp in nineteen forty five after speaking out against Hitler. Back in nineteen sixteen, Volodia falls in love with a girl named Valentina, who later dumps him. He self publishes a poetry collection as a teen Emo king, then inherits two million pounds in nineteen seventeen, money from his uncle, who Brian Boyd mentions in his biography of Nabokov molested

him as a child. One of his experiences seems to be replicated in pretty close detail later in Lolita, in a scene where Humbert Humbert bounces Dolores on his lap in order to pleasure himself. In nineteen seventeen, the February Revolution happens in Russia and Daddy Vlad is made secretary to the provisional government, but is forced to flee with

the family when the Bolshevik Revolution starts. He then serves as the Minister of Justice in nineteen eighteen in the Crimean regional government, and the Nabokov family finally settles in Berlin, Germany permanently in nineteen nineteen, and at this point they are entirely stripped of their court titles and all of their money, and in fact, a necklace of pearls that Nabokov Tethon as a baby are sold so they can make rent in Germany. This is a huge shift in

Nabokov's life. He goes on to attend Cambridge University in England with his brother Sergei, while Daddy Flad begins editing Russian immigrant newspaper rule Back in Berlin, Nabokov begins publishing poetry in his dad's paper, so no nepotism there, and he uses a pen name, Vladimir Syrian, which is a pseudonym meant to distance him and prevent confusion with his dad in a way that kind of evokes Nick Cage's relationship to the Coppola's for me, like he just kind

of got rid of the name and hopes that no one would notice. I get it. You don't want to seem like nepotism, but like you are, and we know that anyways. Like Nick Cage, this ends up being kind of a wash because Syrian is a legitimately talented writer and becomes popular locally. Then in Daddy Vlad is suddenly murdered, completely altering the direction of the family's life. He attends a former colleagues speaking engagement in the hope of repairing

their lapsed friendship. A gunman shoots at the speaker. Daddy Vlad tries to interfere, and he's hit and killed. Nabokov's journals from this night are devastating. What has happened? Tell me what's happened, she asks, Seizing him by the sleeves, he spreads out his hands, something terrible. He sobs, cannot finish, so it's all over, He says nothing. Hessen too says nothing. Their teeth chatter, their eyes dart a lot, and mother understood.

I thought she would faint. So that's it, she repeated, quietly. She seemed to reason it out with herself, how can it be? And then, lad do you understand? In ninety three, Nabokov meets his future wife Vera, a Russian Jew from the upper class who I absolutely love, and there's a very beautiful biography written about her by Stacy Schiff that I highly recommend. They're married in nine in Berlin, and Nabokov as Syrian, continues to write again, occasionally benefiting from

nepotism due to the tragically killed daddy Vlatt. Now firmly a member of the middle class, he begins working to support the family and speaking to his early work, I think this is really interesting and encouraging for those of us that are also writers in our twenties. A lot of his early stories are just okay. As he continues to thrive in the emigrade writing communities, he writes stories

like the Potato Elf. He was not a great writer immediately, which I find to be cool and realistic and comforting and never is really discussed about the great writer canon. Vladimir and Vera were very active in the Russian emigrane community. They tutored and did setitary work, respectively to make ends

meet while they were living there. They end up living in Berlin for twenty years, and Vladimir publishes early novels, including ones that I really like, like The Defense and The Gift, but he never really likes Germany and only has a basic grasp on the language. In nineteen thirty six, when their son Dmitri is only two years old, Vera loses her job because of the increasing anti Semitism in Berlin.

And that same year, and I still cannot wrap my head around this, but that same year, the man who had murdered Daddy, vlad In, is promoted to be second in command of the Russian emigrade group in Berlin, and so the Nabokov's get the funk out of there. They then spent some time in Paris, where Nabokov has a brief affair. Vera finds out it ends, although there's enough

drama in there alone for a decent indie movie. He writes his first English language novel, and mere weeks before the Germans bomb Paris, Vladimir, Vira and Dmitri managed to get to the US. To get there, they have half of their ticket paid for by a Jewish rescue organization that was arranged due to all of the great work that Daddy Flatt had done back in the day, and they crowdfund the rest from their rich friends. And in nineteen forty they get to New York and I mean,

it's all a pretty amazing story. They get to the US, and Nibulkov loves it. They're vowing to become, for all intents and purposes, a fully American writer, although he remains extremely nostalgic for Russia, both in memory and in language. For the rest of his career, he volunteers at the American Museum of Natural History and expands his studies on lepidoptery. And this is a good point to mention that Nabokov

was also a full on butterfly scientist. That's what lepidoptery is, stemming from a boyhood interest and ultimately taking up quite a bit of his time in the nineteen forties while teaching classes in Russian and literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He also worked as the curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University and ultimately contributed work to that field that remains

relevant today. Wild Stuff. In nine he first has the idea for Lolita although at this time he calls the book The Kingdom by the Sea, referencing Poe, and Lolita is called Juanita Dark. Sure, he gains a reputation as an American writer, publishing story after story with The New Yorker. He starts teaching at Cornell in Upstate New York in ninety eight, and Lolita comes out in nineteen and this

changes his life forever. So once Lolita comes out and all of this publication stuff is settled, the bulk off was left with the impressions of the public. And oh did the public respond. Lolita blazes, however, with a perversity of a most original kind. A fine book, a distinguished book, all right, then a great book without a doubt. It is the fifthiest book I've ever read share unrestrained pornography. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in

a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive. What makes the book flame, I think, is first of all, a love affair with the real America three d pages of sex in the head. The first time I read Lolita, I thought it was one of the funniest books I'd ever come on. The second time I read it uncut, I thought it was one of the saddest humbert is all of us. Lolita is

undeniably news, unfortunately bad news, highbrow pornography. Thank you so much to my friends for some truly career defining performances. They're good stuff. So Lolita is public in Paris and early win is when well regarded English critic Graham Green declares Lolita as one of his favorite books of nineteen fifty five, which gets people curious. And then it's a year's long battle for Lolita to see the light of

day in the United States and in England. There's hushed talks of potential court cases, constantly changing obscenity laws, faulty translations into foreign languages, people literally smuggling Olympia Press copies in their suitcases overseas, then having Lolita seized in customs. It was a big dramatic thing. Eventually, once the hype grew big enough in the US, the same publishers that were once turning the bulk off away were now banging down his door trying to get the publishing rights to

the book. So all in all, Lolita was banned as obscene in France from nineteen fifty six to nineteen fifty nine, even though that was the country where it was first published. Like with that math, it was banned in England from nineteen fifty five to fifty nine, Argentina in nineteen fifty nine, and in New Zealand in nineteen sixty. And it wasn't even unbanned in South Africa until two for God's sake, But in nineteen fifty nine what Nabukov has been waiting

for happens. Not only is his book finally published in the US four years later by Walter Minton at Putnam's, it's a massive hit, staying on the bestseller lists for months and selling a hundred thousand copies in its first three weeks. Quick fund sidebar an American show girl named

Rosemary Ridgwell was the one to get Lolita published. She was an avid reader and aspiring opera singer who was actually having an affair with the Putnam publisher, Walter Minton, and she ends up getting credit for this after some negotiating. She makes twenty two thousand dollars in nineteen sixties money for her trouble. That's a hundred ninety thousand dollars today, Go Rosemary. But in the US, Lda never gets a

formal blanket ban. And in nineteen fifty nine, not only is his book finally public in the US four years later, it's a massive hit and it stays on the best seller list for months. Once Lolita is published in the States. For your scorecard, about one out of every three reviews

is bad. The other two were good. And while it is true that certain American public libraries banned Lolita from their shelves, nothing lasted, and the public learning of these bands usually just served to increase the book sales again, And that's the story of most banned books. And what I think is most noteworthy here is that America ended up becoming perhaps more receptive to Lolita than almost any

other country, which Nabokov was thrilled about. But what he couldn't have known is that America was going to take this story wildly out of context for decades to come. I'm talking a parents sending their daughter and a Lolita constom to Nabulkov's door. Weird, And to get a little more into Nabokov's head at this point in his career, I was lucky enough to speak to Dana Dragonoyu, an associate professor of English at Carlton University and Ottawa and

a noted Nabokovian. And that's what scholars who specialize in the bulk of are called. They're like twi Hearts or the BTS Army, but they're adults and probably ones who would resent that comparison. They are the bulk of super fans with credentials. She's written Vladimir Nabukof and the Poetics of Liberalism, Lolita, Law, ethics and politics and more, and she's genuinely the coolest. So here's a little bit of

our discussion. So he's writing Lolita, just in the little interlude between other big projects, and then as she's writing it, he knows that he's got a ticking time bomb on his hands. He knows that, um, he's putting all of this time into this novel that might actually never be published. Edmund Wilson actually hates it. He thinks it's not a great book. Um, Catherine White doesn't want to doesn't want

to cut it. Yeah, so um, he sends it to a few publishers and they all say that they can't under risk of landing in jail themselves or having their UM their publication houses prosecuted. And so then it comes to the attention of other literati, and they pick up the book, and some love it something that it's a resplendent book, and others think that it's pornographic. So UM, somebody by the name of Warden Brown, I think he writes in a British sensationalist publication that this book is

offensive and it ought to be suppressed. And then somebody picks up this story in the New York Times Review of Books, and UM articulates its own opinion, and so a scandal begins to slowly bubble up. With a book off help, they publish a section of the book with his afterward that the afterward which becomes on a book entitled Alita, and that gets published in the Anchor Review

as a kind of testing round. So then so so after that, when UM American publishers realize that there's rama surrounding this novel, they're starting to think that this could be a moneymaker. But I also have found that even Nabokov seemed to be a little back and forth on you know, he he definitely said this is not a moral story. He has mentioned aesthetics in regards to this book, but then he also does seem to get frustrated in some of his at least you know, personal writings when

people seem to miss the point. So yeah, so so what he says on the pedagogical nature of books can sometimes see contradictory. But if you put them all together, So, if you collate them all together and read them together,

the contradiction, uh disappears. Because what he's what he's ultimately always saying, is that he doesn't approve of writings which are exclusively pedagogical, which subordinate everything to the cautionary tale or story, such as fables where the moral lesson is so conspicuously obvious, and part of that so so so, part of this hostility which he has towards pedagogical like

straight up pedagogical literature, is personal. He was chased out of Soviet Russia right during Lennon's push Lenon's seizure of power, and after Nabokov luckily was able to escape, Lennon very quickly clamped down on um all art and made socialist realists are to be the only acceptable way to write in the Soviet Union. Thank you so much to Dana Dragonoio for her time, and we'll be hearing more from

her later in the episode. So, after Lalita, the Bulk of finally gets the literary success he's been chasing for over three decades, he makes enough money to retire from teaching, and rightful to time, he leaves the US and moves into Montro Palace hotel in Switzerland. He writes the screenplay to the nineteen sixty two Lolita movie directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kind of, that's another episode, And most importantly, Nabuko finally has time to turn out some more hits in the

novel space. He releases Pale Fire and Ada, the closest cousin of Lolita and Nabukov's catalog because it deals with another huge cultural taboo incest and that story, which is a whole other podcast. A brother and sister, Atta and Van carry on a lifelong ancestral affair without shame. It's very intense, and in ninety seven Nabokov dies surrounded by his family, and that's his life. We'll be right back

ye now. When it comes to his personal politics, Nabukov definitely falls under the category of problematic face favorite term I hate but feels appropriate. Here he states more than once that he considers women writers to be inferior and didn't want to work with female translators. Here's a quote on that, referencing Jane Austin. I dislike Jane and m prejudiced in fact against all women writers. They are in

another class, okay, king disappointing. Nabokov makes similar comments about working with female translators as well, And it's always interesting to note that Vera Nabokov, his wife, is his closest collaborator throughout his entire career, typing up everything he ever wrote, giving him notes, managing his image, and so on and so on, and he knew how integral her work and

support was to his success. When asked by the publication The Listener in nineteen sixty nine, could you say how important your wife has been as a collaborator in your work, Nabokov cleverly replies I could not, and Vera was firm, as we learn in Stacy Shifts Puliser, winning by our graphy of her in remaining on the sidelines of her

husband's career. So it's complicated, but Nabukov definitely comes up short in giving women their due, and I wouldn't really call him a feminist writer, but then on other issues

he's extremely progressive. Some of the other things that stood out to me just as interesting when researching his life were things like this, his devoted study of butterflies, his deep love and partnership with his wife vera uh story about when he was a kid when he had a French tutor, and he wrote a mean poem about his how his French male tutor had a big gass, and then the tutor was mad at first, but then he thought it was kind of funny, and then they were friends.

He was also a great dad. There's a lot of great stories about him and his son Dmitri. I really like how loyal he is to his Russian roots. Um In addition to all of his fiction, he did this seminal translation of Russia's great poet Alexander Pushkin's magnum Opus, which is called Eugene on Agen. He translated it into English and considered that work and Lolita to be his

biggest contributions to society. Nabokov wasn't active in politics in a day to day sense most speculate because of how political careers had torn his family apart and killed his father, But he spoke out against anti Semitism at every phase of his life and was pretty strongly anti racist as well. He lectured at Spellman College and American Liberal Arts College for Black women, and he formed a friendship with the

college's president, Florence Read that lasted for years. This is further expanded on in Nabokov's short essay on a book entitled Lolita, included at the end of most editions of the book. Referencing how the subject matter of Lolita put off publishers at first, he says this the refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme, but on the theme itself. For there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far

as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are a Negro white marriage which is a complete and glorious success, resulting in lots of children and grandchildren. And the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life and dies in his sleep at the age of a hundred and six. And finally, what I love about Nabokov is that he was so judge, at least in the literary criticism sense, the way that you and me gossip about like people

in our lives. Nibukov would just completely go off about authors, like really aggressively, and it's kind of funny, like he he likes James Joyce sometimes, and he likes Alexander Pushkin who was obviously dead, and Shakespeare who was super dead, and Charles Dickens super super dead. But everyone else, ever, he would just say they were trash, like he couldn't relax. I lost count of examples of him just being judge

about other authors. F Scott Fitzgerald, Nabokov says trash. Boris Pastor Nak, who was a Russian writer who wrote Doctor Javago, was literally afraid of Nabokov. When they were translating Javago into English, someone suggested that Nabokov should be the translator, and Pastor n was like, no, I don't think he would want to, And then Nabako was asked and was like, no, I absolutely don't want to. That book is trash. Henry James garbage, Miguel Cervantes gag. But he did teach Don

Quixote in his class. Jane Austen also taught her hated her work, thought she was born Virginia Woolf. No thank you. These two examples are arguably also him being sexist freud Kinsey grow up and her famously he hated Dostoyevsky, possibly one of the most famous Russian authors of all time. Put him in the trash can, says Nabokov. So he would hate my writing. He would hate your writing. It's all very dramatic, and I love how judge he was.

It's very funny. So that's Nabokov, definitely a strange and complicated literary figure. But you'll notice, unlike the post Carrol's and Dante's that Humbert Humbert harps on in Lolita, Nabokov was not a Humbert Humbert type. So how does he write as Humbert and why. It's also important to note that Lolita was not Nabokov's first attempt to address the

theme of pedophilia by a long shot. He outlines Humberd's approach to marrying a woman to get sexual access to her child in the Russian language novel The Gift in the mid nineteen thirties, then tries his hand at writing the account of a pedophile again in the nine Russian language novella The Enchanter, written in Paris the year before

Nabukhov moves to the US. For a long time, Nbako thought that The Enchanter had been destroyed entirely, but in the sixties a copy resurfaced in his papers, and that was later translated from Russian to English by his son Dmitri, who, by the way, is a bachelor king piece of work all his own. He was like an opera singer, a legacy keeper. He once got into huge trouble with his dad for judging a lolita contest in Italy while he was in his twenties, which was exactly as problematic as

it sounded. The Enchanter oscillates between first and third person narration and follows a nameless protagonist to Nabakov calls Arthur later in life, who, like Humbert, is attracted to young girls. He runs into a nameless girl in the park marries her mother to gain access to her. The mother dies soon after. In this story, she is sick and close to death when he marries her instead of running in

front of a car like Charlotte. The protagonist then abducts the daughter under the guise of being her guardian, intending to take her on a long road trip. Their first night away, while she's sleeping, he attempts to rape her, but she wakes up, screams, and the protagonist panics and full of shame, runs into traffic and is killed. It's not his best and the similarities are mainly in the outline of the story, but this does prove that Lolita

wasn't a passing lark. Thematically, Nabokov had an interest in telling a story with a pedophile protagonist deceiving everyone around them, the devil in plain sight. And that's a pretty heavy theme for a writer that never swore, but there it is. And it's even more interesting that Nabokov claims to have destroyed this story. But fifteen whole year years later, we find a lot of the ideas in the Enchanter still intact in Lolita. I'm going to kick it over to

another expert here, maybe the expert. Brian Boyd wrote the seminal biography of Nabokov, working directly with Vladimir Nabokov's wife Vera and his son Dmitry Nabokov for over ten years to get it done. He is the Nebukovian. He first found Lolita at a bookstand his parents owned in New Zealand as a young teen and sort of snuck it out as a literary contraband it was then then later on he discovered Nabokov's novel Pale Fire and really fell

in love with all of Nabokov's work. And I've got to say I was afraid the Nabokovians were going to be really intimidating, but they have been nothing but kind and shared a ton of resources with me that were extremely helpful in realizing this series. And they're really excited about new perspectives and active criticism of Nabokov's work. So here's some of Brian Boyd and my discussion about The

Enchanter and Lolita. I mean, he did he. I guess he so passionate about freedom that he liked to break restrictions. That was part of it, I think um and especially that artistic freedom. And well, I did a review of The Enchanted, which was probably the harshest that's appeared anywhere. It was appeared with the title that I suggested pre hash fair enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I think it's a terrible little story. Really, Dmitri Nabokov's translation does

it much of a service. Would have been much better if if it had been translated while in the Boca was alive and could revise to me to his translation. But it isn't that very clogged late Norbakov Russian pro style. So there was that, and the fact that really nobody was realized in the character in the characterization, the setting wasn't realized very well. Um, it's also different from Lolita, which is so funny. You alone, My students found out had to a lot of them have found that increasingly

hard to see. Um, beautifully detailed about America, and it's just got so many strands going in it, with the relationship between Humbled and Charlotte and Humbled and cruelty, and the l term cruelty and so on. The blography like posing challenges for his readers, and and here one of the great challenges is to read it independently of Humbled to see, and so many people fail that test. I don't know if he kind of figured out what what

a high percentage of readers would fail it. But you take those early readers like Lionel Trilling and Robertson Davies and the things they say about you know, Trilling is saying it's it's a book about love, and Davey is saying he thinks it's a seduction of a man by a corrupt girl. And you know, it's just snaggering that these highly literate, highly educate did highly imagine the readers could read it so badly on it does I think did show a lot of the kind of predatory assumptance

in the male psyche time. Absolutely, I and I and I found it really interesting. And again just with like there's right off the bat kind of this bizarre misinterpretation that is not the author's fault. Well, I used to tell my students paying a picture of Nbakov and then contrast with Humbert So say that, yeah, there's this famous rugby player who's was six ft five and I said that Dmitri Nebakov was was six five years as tall

as as journal learner. Um, Dmitri is not the leader and the back was not humbuged, and just just emphasizing that, and and then inviting them to stressing how much the bak of his on Lolita's side, and trying to read the novel from the angle. Yeah, the challenge of not being seduced by Humbert's rhetoric. Thank you so much to Brian, and we're gonna be talking to him a lot throughout the series. So Lolita is, of course far more nuanced

than the Enchanter, and that's great news. We talked a little bit analytically about the book in the last episode, but I have a few more things that I'd like to hit on here. Now. If you're in a Book of fan that loves his use of language, we could be here all day. So I'm going to try to stay focused thematically, but I will mention a few uses of language that are especially fun to me. Protagonist Humbert.

Humbert writes Lolita under observation and a sanatorium and later in a jail cell, which the Book of would explain is the animal drawing its own cage. Stylistically, Lolita is kind of a whole of mirrors language wise. We see the same phrases pop up over and over while humbered plays with language to lure the readers in their a great essay on this in the collection The Magician's Doubts by Michael Wood. The hotel where Humbert first rapes Dolores

is called The Enchanted Hunters. Later on, Dolores isn't a clare quiality play. That's the writer that eventually abducts her out of humbert subduction, and the play is called The Hunted Enchanters. And when Dolores sees Humbert again, pregnant and poor at seventeen, she lives on Hunter Road. There's a character who co writes qualities plays with him named Vivian dark Bloom. Mix those letters around and yes it's an

anagram for Vladimir and a Bukoff. There's all of the po references, and a Buckov manages to insert some of his opinions on pop psychologists like Kinsey and Freud. Through Humbert's telling psychiatrists at the sanatoriums. He stays at some of the popular theories of his day instead of what he was actually going through, making the psychologists feel accomplished and Humbert feel like he's deceived them. And let's hit on that for a moment. Why did in a book

off he Freud so much. We're going to really unpack this in a future episode, but I wanted to quickly share this insight for Lucia Williams, who will be talking with throughout this show. She's a former professor of psychology at the Universidad Federal Day Sal Carlos in Brazil, where she coordinated LAPREV, the Laboratory of Violence Analysis and Protection. The paper of hers I am siting here is called reading Lolita to Understand Child Sexual Abuse, and the reasoning

is this quote. Nabokov was intuitively right, even in his antipathy for Sigmund Freud, who could have advanced knowledge on the impact of child sexual abuse in human development and did not for it. Came back from Paris shocked with the maltreated children he saw examined by child abuse pioneer Ambrosia Tardieu, a French pathologist and expert in forensic medicine.

In his Assault on Truth, Jeffrey M. Masson describes how Freud was forced by Viennese society to abandon his proposed seduction theory, in which hysteria occurred as a result of premature sexual experiences, as no one could believe that so many respectable gentlemen could indeed sexually abuse their own daughters. As a result, Freud abandoned his theory and started defending that the patient's report was a mere fabrication based on

underlying repressed sexual urges unquote. There's a ton more. But something Nbakov struggled with after Lalita became popular was critics and readers conflating Humbert's attitudes with his own. Now, well, I personally don't hate all of the fictional John Ray juniors forward warning the reader that Humbert is a pedophile who's not to be trusted. Nabakov thought that John Ray Jr. Was a little bit over the top, and his moralizing something I would guess he would feel about a lot

of culture today. I politely disagree. But speaking to this point. In conversation with Russian Jewish American author Herbert Gould the following exchange, Gold says that his quote sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert, Humbert and Lalita is very strong unquote. Nabakov replies, no, it is not my sense of morality of the Humbered Humbered Lolita relationship that is strong. It is humbled since he cares I do not.

Herbert says later on that some might find Humbered to be quote touching, to which Nabokov says this, I would put it differently. Humbered Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching that epithet. And it's true tear erudized sense can only apply to my poor little girl. And let's talk about that girl, Dolores the book Dolores, because Humberts descriptions of her very often obscure the resilient young girl who never should have been put

in these circumstances to begin with. Dolores, in being declared the Lada by Humbert, suffers the fate that many of Nabokov's female characters do. She's fixated on, misunderstood and lusted after by a male protagonist that doesn't actually care who she is or how she feels. And there's a lot of reasons why readers often complate the actions and opinions

of character with their authors. And again, we could talk about death of the author theory all day, but I have an idea of why this might happen to Nibakov specifically, and that is because virtually all of Nabakov's protagonists and narrators are men, with the exception of one short story. Many of them are Russian emigres or new to a country, like Nabakov was in Germany and then in America, and

they're often also academics like Professor Nabakov. Like any writer, Nabakov pulled from what he knew in order to write, and like any good writer, his characters are not him. It's interesting reading interviews with him from this time because it often seems like people come into a discussion with

the assumption that writing about Humbert is automatically condoning it. Ye. When asked why he named his criminal protagonist Humbert Humbert, Nabokov told Playboy in that it's quote very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. But let's get back to Nabokov's women. Also the name of

an incredible essay collection recommended to me by Dana. Here's a little bit more of our discussion there is, like you're saying, a lot of focus in his work on children suffering and then also women suffering, even the references to you know, his feelings on anti Semitism. You know, it's like all the people that Humbert doesn't want us to like, um make an anti Semitic comment at some point.

So you mentioned that, yes, the misogyny. He was very progressive on race for a man is of his time, like exceptionally so and um in part he inherited that from his father. Uh. So Nabokov himself comes from a very kind of Caucasian aristocratic, upper middle class UM background. So I I think that would be true that that women typically suffer in his fiction. Um, and for a vast array of reason. So ums many commits suicide. Uh,

some are killed in freak accidents caused by men. So the fact that Charlotte dies in the car accident, there's no reason why she should have died in that car accident, had um had humbered, humbled, not placed, all those other things which led to that outcome. So Um, he doesn't, Um, he doesn't acknowledge his contribution to her grizzly faith. But it's there, right, it's all of those variables he put there. Um. Now,

why why is there this? Why is there kind of proliferation of angelic women who perish and suffer in the book of and kind of shallow viragos who are opportunists and destroy men, because there are many of those as well. Um, well, it's it's I would argue, and this is my argument, but it's not imprint yet. That um that that Nabokov was born and raised in a kind of culture of honor and courtesy. That is a legacy of of medievalism,

the medieval literature which he studied at Cambridge. His tripos at Cambridge was in the Romance languages, so uh, the literature of France in the Middle Ages. Um. And Nabokov grew up in an aristocratic family and Russia, where Um, honor and gender ethics were very important. Men did certain things, women did certain other things. If a woman's honor was impugned, a man was expected to rise to her defense. His father almost fought in a duel in the bakov himself

almost fought in a couple of duels. Uh. There's an anecdote, for instance, that that Brian Boyd tells when a bok I was very young living in Berlin. Um, a violinist of Romanian extraction was well known to be a wife abuser, and then his wife died and she was full of bruises, and the suspicion was that either he killed her or that she committed suicide because she couldn't stand you abuse anymore. So Nibakov goes to the club where the violinist is still playing and he beats them up. So so this

act of vigilante justice right. But um, More broadly, I think your question UM can be answered very productively because Nabokov, like many Russian writers, was fascinated with with childhood, but not not in a sexual way, but as a kind of test case for innocence and vulnerability. So in Nabokov's own work, UH children um figure very frequently in his fiction,

and most frequently as victims. So the figure of the suffering child haunts Nabokov's imagination from the well, I I would say, from the moment that uh Nazism begins, and and and and his mind is haunted by children being burned in gas ovens, and so from then on to the end of Vada. So that's like the entirety of his greatest career, the child becomes iconic in his imagination.

Brian Boyd also points out the narrative significance that children have within Nabokov's work, Well, I think really it was because for him the innocence of childhood was so important. I think he was drist out almost by by the way child was sexualized too early in America, and he felt uneasy about Dmitri being off at at summer camps

and so on, the corruption with young young children. I'm interested in in your thoughts on the female characters, that doomed women there are, There are a lot of doomed men in you think you think of the illusion defense and the suicide that that that whole book leads to so painfully inexorably, or or Field's father and the gift to you know, presum only has been killed or killed summer in Central Asia, or Martin in Glory, who presumably has been killed with trying to cross the border into Russia.

Or David the boy who has tortured in that ghastly Wayne in Ben Sinister and then his father who goes mad and runs towards people in the shot you know, uh, and the bok of knew he had the best friend of his childhood, his cousin jury shot with his head ripped off by machine guns in nine and then his his father's murder Ino you know, Edmund White complains that that there's too much violent death in the Baca. The

Baka head lived it. And of course as Shade gets shot and in pale fire and there's a huge person gets burnt in transparent thing. So okay, there are doomed women, but there are doomed people of every kind. Thank you so much again to Brian Boyd and to Dina Dragonaiu for all of that wonderful insight. So, as many have noted in the past, Dolores is not completely absent in the text of Lolita, but she is absolutely sidelined by

Humbert in order to better serve his own narrative. There is far more said by Humbert about what he fixates and projects onto her, his physical desire, extremely specific details about her appearance, his paranoia, and his blame when she's physically absent, than about Dolores herself. That is to say, we hear a lot about Lolita, who was a fantasy, not Dolores, who is very real in enduring a personal tragedy. Where we do find Lores is in some of her dialogue.

She says stuff like I must go now, kiddo, beaute swankswell peach sab stinker, jerk, super luscious, goon, drip you dull bulb a lot of stuff, as well as descriptions of what she likes. However, when Humpert describes Dolores's interest to us, it's mostly just to call them annoying, a combination of naivete and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of

blue sulks and rosy mirth. Lolita, when she chose could be a most exasperating brat, I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement gripping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey eyed style, and what is called goofing off, a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional way. What Humbert is

so snobbishly describing here is a regular kid. I mean, if you needed any more evidence that this isn't a love story. He does not like the parts of Dolores that he cannot sexualize or control, and there are a few references to the extremely deep despair that Dolores, who again is just a kid, is feeling about her situation.

There's references to the Knights, she spends crying, a few moments with her friends, and this really devastating scene that Humbert reflects on at the end of the book, when Dolores sees her friend Avis have an innocuous, affectionate interaction with her dad while Dolores is holding a kitchen knife. Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father's neck and ear while with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring. I saw Lolita's smile lose all its light

and become a frozen little shadow of itself. And the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with a silver handle, a freak blow on the ankle. And while you do need to look for these passages, there's so much here. There's a reminder of how unhappy do loris is, that she's also experiencing grief from losing her parents, her inability to communicate with the people in her life

about this despair out of fear and trauma. There's a lot and then a buck offs themselves grew protective of Lolita. I already showed you this quote from Vera last episode, but here it is in a bit longer form. I wish someone would notice the tender description of the child's helplessness, her pathetic dependence on the monstrous h h and her heartrending courage, all along culminating in that squalid but essentially

pure and healthy marriage and her dog. They all missed the fact that the horrid little brat Lolita is essentially very good. Indeed, or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly and found a decent life with poor Dick more to her liking than the other kind. I also want to take another opportunity here to give Charlotte Hayes her due. While she's portrayed as flighty, selfish and cruel to her daughter, a degree of which definitely

appears true, try and look through Humbert's language here. Charlotte is a single parent at a time where this was not made easy in the late nineteen forties. She's still mourning her husband, as well as something that's only mentioned once, the death of a two year old boy who had been Dolores's baby brother, and Dolores likely had unresolved issues

around a trauma like this as well. So while Charlotte does seem unkind and distant to her daughter, relatable even considering all that, there's a context to this all its own, and so whether you like her or not, she is far more complicated and going through a lot more than Humbert is comfortable with or interested in acknowledging, And the book of himself found for the first time in his career a character he had written was being taken out

of his authorial control. He says the following to the writer Graham Green in n before Lolita had even been published in the United States. My poor Lolita is having a rough time, Nabokov wrote to Green. The pity is that if I had made her a boy, or a cow or a bicycle, Philistines might never have flinched. Where there's this exchange from the Paris Review. Humbert was fond of little girls, not simply young girls, nymphets our girl children,

not starlets and sex kittens. Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his aging mistress, and it is understandable that the press and people in the Bokov circle had a difficult time understanding how a writer who was by all accounts nothing like Humbert in his criminality, plugged himself into such a sick

protagonist mind. And in fact, there were even parents of students at Cornell who were nervous to let their kids take classes from Nabokov. What we know about Nubukov's ability

to create hu Bert comes down to his research. He looked at a number of case studies of American pedophiles, some of which will discuss in a future episode, and also later said that he had listened to how girls spoke to each other on buses and in public parks, and he wrote a character early into Lolita's publication history.

Nabokov also attempted to control what appeared on the cover of his book, saying this, I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with a light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain, and no girls. If you've ever seen a cover of Lolita, you will know that this wish was definitely not respected, and that there's been a wide variety of We will

will get to that in a future episode. Even later in his career, Nabokov would go on to take public issue with how the Dictionary defined the word nymphete, a word that he invented, whose definition he was still ultimately unable to control. Lolita had grown too big, and so eventually, as time went on, Nabakov kind of stopped trying and moved on to write other work. Lolita had secured for him the life he had always wanted. He could write full time. He was acclaimed as a great American writer.

So when Stanley Kubrick and James Harris bought the rights to the movie in ninety eight and invited Nabokov to write the screenplay, after a while he said yes. And it's about here that we're going to say goodbye to Dolores for now. As far as I'm concerned, she exists solely in the book. What we find and what global culture takes away from this book, at least in the general sense, is just Lolita, the fantasy that a pedophile is trying to sell us, not the girl that is

suffering behind it. I really love Dolores. Justice for Dolores, and and I'm very attached to her. She is a kid that is able to find these moments of joy for herself during an inhuman experience. And even inside of this horrifying account by a pedophile with a vested interest in winning your sympathy, Dolores still shines through in these moments. Nabokov has his flaws and we should not ignore them.

But close readers of the book and the scholars who have been discussing, guarding, and cataloging the entirety of Nabokov's work over the years, the Nabokovians, I love to say that have not found a shred of pro pedophilia within the text itself. There really is no good faith interpretation of the work that will say so, although there's plenty of bad faith interpreters out there, the discussion academically has actually begun to actively encourage a feminist reading and teaching

of the text. Dana Dragonoio with the mic drop here the novel Um and even Humbert. Humbert does led through the cracks uh knowledge about her actions and activities, which Um really tell us beyond any reasonable doubt that she was trying to make an escape from him. So we're told that she's squirreling money away that he gives her for the various sexual acts that he imposes upon her. She squirrels away money not to buy confectionery, but to

run away. She's trying to get away from him, and then he takes away that money like the depths of his villainies kind of uh. He makes promises which she uh he which he breaks the moment that she has uh you know, had had had sex with him, So he makes promises that he retracts um and the minute that she can get away from him, she leaves him. So so we see a a we know because he admits it that she's crying every night. Um. He tells us that he had trained himself to ignore her sobs

in the night every night. Um uh. He admits that she only gets reconciled to him only because had nowhere else to go. So um. There's not a single moment in the novel which suggests to us that Lolita was actually um enjoying her life with him. It was totally a condition of imprisonment. Um. We do. We don't even have the Stockholm syndrome. She she doesn't even suffer from the Stockholm syndrome. Right, she never she never worns something to him. Yeah, she never wants to be there. She

she never wants to be there. And and the irony of irony is the kind of tragic irony that that she makes her escape with somebody who's even worse than Humbered. So how to teach Lolita? What can you teach us? A debate that hasn't been put to rest, and it relates to um. The question of how uh Lolita suppressed in the novel Uh isn't is a debate that is now of several decades standing, and it began with a number of feminist scholars who noticed that there is a

temporal discrepancy in Humbert's account. There's three days missing, Um, three days missing in the chronology that he gives us. And if those three days that are missing is not simply a typo, but Nabokov intentionally put it there, that means that Humbert never receives a letter from Dolly, never goes to Colmont to meet her in her pregnant state, and never marries Quilty. And there was never an equality to begin with. So that flow to the possibility that

Dolly got away from him much earlier. We don't know really what happens to her. Even if she's dead, she might even be alive and well. And um. This this argument has its sympathizers and it's the tractors. Brian Boyd has showed that it's almost certainly a typo. Nabokov was

very careless with his dates. Um. But those who are in favor of this theory will point out that when when the book was translated into Russian, uh and the Book of Uh does not in the Book of does not correct the error, but in fact underscores it, leaves the air in place and draws attention to it. So if it's intentional, if it's intentional, the destiny of Dolly could be something very different than the tragic destiny that

Humbert inscribed in the book. So, if you are an adult still out here saying this is a love story, let me be perfectly clear how I feel about it. You missed the fucking point. But hey, you are certainly not alone there. So in the early nineteen sixties, then a book of come back to the US from Swiss Island so that Vladimir can write the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's Lolita. What was about to happen was well, yeah, next week on Lolita Podcast. This has been a production

of I Heart Radio. My name's Jamie Loftus, I right and host the show. My producers are the wonderful Sophie Lifterman, Miles Gray, Beth and Macaluso and Jack O'Brien. My editor is the amazing Isaac Taylor. Additional research and transcription work from Ben Loftus. Music is by Zoe Blade and her

theme is from Brad Dicker. Thank you so much to my guest voices on this episode, as well as Ziz Vora as Humbert Humbert, Robert Evans as Vladimir in the bukup Anna Hostia Sharene, Lani Unis, Grace Thomas, and Miles Gray. We'll see you next week.