Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0003399, Wed, 30 Sep 1998 11:49:52 -0700

Subject
Lolita and pedophilia (fwd)
Date
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 17:43:45 -0700 (PDT)
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU>
Subject: Lolita and pedophilia

From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>

My namesake from gorod New York wrote:

"I don't think I even need to add that _Lolita_ is about a passionate love
doomed to be unrequited, and not about pedophilia."

Like Thomas Bolt, I quite disagree. My problem with Lyne's movie, which
many of us watched in Ithaca during the Nabokov Festival, was that it
appears to endorse a similar message while _Lolita_, to me, is about
both unrequited passionate/obsessive love _and_ pedophilia. It is
testimony to Nabokov's greatness, it seems to me, that he himself does not
see the two as the either/or proposition. The movie makes the pedophilia
part much weaker than the "passion" part by, among other things, almost
totally omitting H.H.'s pre-Lolita history -- and that, in my opinion,
definitely robs the movie of the boundless complexity that Nabokov so
skillfully and creatively put into his novel.

Galya Diment