I doubt (or maybe just can't bear the thought) that Nabokov ever acted on a pedophilic impulse. He seems too psychologically astute to be ignorant of the hellish, often lifelong emotional pain endured by child sex abuse victims, and too emotionally sensitive to have inflicted that pain.

However, it seems obvious that he had such impulses at some point in his life. His descriptions of Lolita are so rapturous that they must be rooted in his own observations and sensations, to some degree. Yes he was a phenomenally gifted artist-illusionist, and Humbert was anything but his mouthpiece or stooge, but even VN wasn't immune to the artistic laws Mario Vargas Llosa describes in his Letters to a Young Novelist:

“All stories are rooted in the lives of those who write them; experience is the source from which fiction flows. That doesn’t mean, of course, that novels are always thinly disguised biographies of their authors; rather, that in every fiction, even the most freely imagined, it is possible to uncover a starting point, a secret node viscerally linked to the experiences of the writer....I’ll venture a little further in discussing the themes of fiction. The novelist doesn’t choose his themes; he is chosen by them. He writes on certain subjects because certain things have happened to him. In the choice of a theme, the writer’s freedom is relative, perhaps even nonexistent. In any case, it is nothing when compared with his freedom to choose the literary form of his work; there, it seems to me, he enjoys total liberty – and total responsibility. My impression is that life – a big word, I know – inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories."

I can no more believe that Nabokov never lusted for "nymphets" than I could believe John Muir never felt anything for the Sierras, but merely imagined a narrator enraptured by them.

I've always wondered if VN concealed an admission in these words to Playboy: "Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade—demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."

In other words, they were there to begin with, and needed booting out. Regardless of what Matt Ridley's claims are (I haven't read The Red Queen), I highly doubt most men lust for girls as young as Lolita.

Brian T.

PS My mistake: The VN gargoyle quote isn't from Playboy but from an interview with BBC television (reprinted in Strong Opinions). And in searching for the source I discovered that I'm not the only one to have wondered if VN was making an admission of sorts.