Friday, August 10, 2007
 
N.K writes about "...Vladimir Nabokov, the 20th-century writer whose individualistic Western characters have shown Russians how to live in freedom and modernity...[ ... ] The classics of Russian literature should make us proud [...]But wouldn't Russians rather see their nation step out of the dreamland of fiction and start living in modernity, not in some imagined greatness? To be sure, modernity has its uncertain, scary side - as Nabokov has shown through his most sinister character, the sexual predator Humbert Humbert of "Lolita." ...
 
In this article my attention was captivated by the observation on "Lolita"  linked to modernity and the Western world: "the sexual predator Humbert Humbert",  thereby dismissing the love-story in Lolita - and almost everything else - by generally misplacing  HH's confessions in VN's best-selling work. I wonder if other L-participants were similarly taken aback by this kind of summing up of last century's Russian-American Nabokov's novel.  
 

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