JM: J. Minervini observed that Evison's book is "morally anaerobic", therefore "irresponsible", unlike VN's rendering of HH in "Lolita". I'd like to bring up again one of the issues linked to "God is Dead in Russian fiction", as presented by Dolinin*. Namely:  Is "everything permitted" in the worlds of fiction? If not, what "God" speaks through the author? Although I'm incompetent to philosophically and critically discuss morality in art or the artist's social responsibility, I think this theme deserves critical attention in a VN forum, since there is no absolute definition of "morality" ( should we follow European philosophers like Aristotle, Kant or, in America, Rorty to understand VN's scope?).By chance, a sequence of postings by Sandy Klein indirectly serve as witness to the importance of "Lolita" and VN's "search of truth", also dealing with items such as "defiance of a repressive régime... coercion"  or "endorsing a fictional creation",  ie: helping us to evaluate a true work of art's manifold dimensions that sometimes become manifest mainly through the metaphorical understanding of (literal) "sexual immorality" in art (cf. Bataille, Baudelaire,Artaud,aso). 

 

Sandy Klein quoting a review about M. Jehlen's, Five Fictions in Search of Truth [...] Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. [...] She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge [...] in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass.
Sandy Klein on Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again, by Graham Vickers, review by Steven G. Kellman
Reading Lolita in Tehran, clandestinely, Azar Nafisi defied a repressive régime. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel of eros perverted and thwarted[...] Nafisi explains how the book helped beleaguered Iranian women understand the ways others take control of our voices and ourselves.Two decades earlier, amid the ideological chill of the Cold War, I was reading Lolita in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia. Nabokov's book was banned, but the students I shared contraband copies with devoured the Russian American's brilliant fiction of coercion.Recently, teaching the book in San Antonio, I was asked by a student to be excused from the reading assignment because she was Christian and had been told that Lolita was offensive. No one rejects Macbeth on the grounds that murder is most foul, and I tried to convince her that depiction of pedophilia does not imply endorsement [...] A cultural meteorologist, Graham Vickers examines the causes and consequences of what Nabokov called "Hurricane Lolita." [...**]