Even though I have loved Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Russian literature overall, I kept away from Nabokov’s Lolita for a long time. 37-year-old Humbert falls for 12-year-old Dolores Haze. It just seemed too disturbing… but when Iranian author and activist, Azar Nafisi, wrote and titled her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, after it, I could no longer resist. She said, “The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted.”
Lolita is listed as one of TIME magazine’s 100 best books. It’s as critically acclaimed as it is continuously banned worldwide. It has been analyzed non-stop, its characters judged on moral thresholds. When I started to read it, I realized right away that Lolita is just simply stunning, equal parts of brilliance and horror. Nabokov, fluent in Russian, French, and English by the age of seven, would write and translate amongst languages all his life and his obsession with the French principle of finding le mot juste – the right word – would make his prose absolutely perfect. And this inspired in me an obsession with Nabokov and endless nights reading through his books and biographies.
The Luzhin Defense
One of the few books Nabokov wrote in his native tongue, it tells the story of Alexander Luzhin, an absent-minded boy turned chess prodigy. In a climactic moment when he is matched against another grandmaster, he suffers a mental breakdown. To help him recover, all reminders of the game are removed from his surroundings and he is prevented from ever playing again. But no matter. In his mind, he begins to see his life playing out like a chess game, a repetition of moves, an infinite of variables. And we, as readers, see the familiar correlation between genius and madness.
Inspired by the chessmaster Curt von Bardeleben, who was a personal friend of Nabokov, Luzhin, like the real-life Bardeleben, is unable to control his madness and jumps out of a window to end his own life.
The Gift
Nabokov’s final – and some consider his best – novel that he wrote in Russian, The Gift is about an emigré poet living in Berlin who decides to write a biography for his late father. Although Nabokov pointed out in the prelude that the story is an ode to Russian literature and not about himself, there are many parallels – a Russian writer exiled in Germany, a studier of butterflies, and the many lives overshadowed by tyranny. In the book, as he was fleeing, the narrator states, “In my suitcases were more manuscripts than clothes.” And I thought of Nabokov, not his character.
But more importantly, this story of art imitating life imitating art is evocative of Nabokov’s great loves – an exile’s love for his country, a poet’s love for other poets, a human being’s love for the beauty of the world, a writer’s love for words, Nabokov’s lifelong love for his readers. As Humbert pleads in the beginning of Lolita, “I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t..”
Invitation to a Beheading
One of Nabokov’s inspirations was Franz Kafka, the prolific yet tortured Czech writer who burned 90% of his writing but whose surviving works would non the less become a quintessential part of the literary canon. Invitation to a Beheading, like Kafka’s The Castle, is a commentary on totalitarianism and the irrational world. The main character is condemned to death for committing an imaginary crime in an imaginary country. Executioners are masquerading as his relatives and fellow inmates.
This was one of Nabokov’s own favorite works, and it is one of mine too. The story of a condemned man living out his final days writing desperately in his cell amidst the absurdity of undefinable crimes and incomprehensible rules is an ode to the many writers that have been lost under all the dictatorships of the world. There is so much to be said about dictators who fear great writers and great literature so much they seek to destroy them. But they’ve never really succeeded. While they have killed many writers and burned many books, stories and ideas live on, louder than history. Even in Soviet-era Russia, writers who couldn’t write things down memorized their words instead and passed them on from mind to mind until the stories were smuggled out of the country to be published elsewhere.
Bend Sinister
Another searing fiction on totalitarian rule, Bend Sinister tells the story of Adam Krug, an intellectual who refuses to abide by the government’s new philosophy of “Ekwilism.” Similar to extreme Communism, it aims to abolish individuality for the benefit of society as a whole. He watches as his friends are carted off to prison, and still he refuses to adhere. After his son is kidnapped and killed, he is shot to death by the dictator’s henchmen.
While the story of totalitarian regimes wreaking havoc on society, murdering their citizens, and attempting to destroy civilization is a common commentary, both in books and in real life, it bears repeating to show us that freedom is precarious and to constantly remind us of how easily democracies can fall.
Despair
Inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Despair’s main character, Hermann, undertakes the perfect crime – his own murder. When he meets a homeless man, Felix, who looks much like him, he convinces his doppelgänger to pretend to be him. He then kills Felix for the insurance money, but it turns out there is no resemblance after all, and he is caught while in hiding by the police.
Written in Germany in the years leading up to WWII, as Hitler rose to power, most copies of Despair were destroyed by German bombs during the war. Nabokov rewrote the book, this time in English, and that edition is still in publication.
Pale Fire
The title comes from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, “The moon’s an arrant thief/ And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.” A metaphoric line about creativity transcends into a frame story of a book within a book. Pale Fire begins with a foreword for the scholarly edition of a poem entitled “Pale Fire,” followed by a commentary, followed by an index. There are two plots – the apparent publication of the poem and the frame story of the unqualified and clinically insane editor who believes himself to be the King of Zembla and the poem to be about him. The 99-line poem in the book is in itself a laudable body of work, but the satirical and unique storytelling of the book’s entirety is the masterpiece.
Speak, Memory
Nabokov’s heartfelt autobiography, hailed by John Updike and countless other literaries, Speak, Memory tells of the author’s early days in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Born to a liberal father in an aristocratic household, his family was forced to flee when the monarchy fell. It’s the story of a childhood uprooted with one of the single most significant events in world history in the backdrop.
They had thought the move would be temporary, but they were never able to return home. After completing his studies at Cambridge, Nabokov became a famed poet and author in Berlin and France before teaching comparative literature at Wellesley, then curating the lepidoptery department at Harvard.
Written in episodic narrative, his story jumps from memory to memory, more like a family album rather than a chronological history. In this way, he remembers his past and his homeland with nostalgia and longing. Because of his synesthesia – he saw words as colors and read colors as words – the telling is vibrant and passionate. So much departed from the horrors I felt when I first read Lolita. But to me, this is the true Nabokov as he should be remembered – the prolific writer and forever curious academic with a witty and brilliant mind.
Lolita
I know that to many, Nabokov is synonymous with no other work than Lolita. And while that book deserves its place in the literary canon in every way, Nabokov’s brilliance goes far beyond. I often wonder how many people would know his name, read any of his books, if it wasn’t for Lolita. This story that’s told from Humbert’s point of view as if it was some glorious love affair they had. But it’s actually ruinous and tragic, and shattering when Dolores dies at the end. Told in such beautiful words, the genius of it is how Nabokov made us love a story of one of the most deplorable characters in literary history.
Today pedophilia and so many other sexual predilections have been told so many times, the story of Lolita may no longer seem surprising to many of us. By now, even I have read far more graphic scenes of sex and abuse. But in 1953, Lolita was turned down by numerous American publishers who called it pornographic trash. Nabokov resolved to publish it in France, although unbeknownst to him, the publisher, Olympia Press, was mostly known for pornographic literature. It was a small publication – 5,000 copies in all – and might have gone largely unnoticed. But when Graham Greene ranked it as one of the best three books of the year in the London Sunday Times, the controversy that followed catapulted the book to stardom.
Subsequently, countless books and analyses have been published on Lolita. There are curriculum guides on how to teach the book to students in college, and countless Russian Lit majors have written their theses on it. And there’s still backlash and condemnation on whether the book should be taught at all. Make no mistake, Humbert is a rapist, as Azar Nafisi so accurately calls him in Reading Lolita in Tehran. But the story is just as much about Dolores and the world that allows her to be defiled and corrupted by men like Humbert.
Nabokov said this was the book he found the hardest to write. And to me, it’s about that too. In an imperfect, often cruel world, writers are tasked to give voice to the voiceless, tell the most difficult stories, remind us of ideals to strive for, and force us to constantly rethink the way we see the world.
