Sandy Klein sent an article ( "Opinion")
under the title "Russia's Inspector
General", by Nina L. Khrushcheva,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.