Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Nabokovian blunders
From: "Sandy Klein" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 23:22:02 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:[email-masked]] On
Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 6:49 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Nabokovian blunders

Dear Andrew

I greatly appreciate much of Nabokov's humour, including his apeing
take- off of Poe's short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. But I
don't think there is anything funny hiding behind Nabokov's
gender-bending game. I believe Nabokov was involved in a covert attempt
to overturn Freud's myth of the Oedipus complex (i.e. incest is a brutal
reality for children, not a fantasy.) He also intended Lolita, I
believe, to spark widespread reform of the criminal law statutes. All
too often 1950s the criminal law failed to recognise that boys too could
be victims of child sexual assault. I discuss this failure in SNLR.

My opinions are entirely consistent with what Stacy Schiff had to say
was on Nabokov's mind when he was actually writing Lolita. She observed:

"Nabokov had indeed researched "Lolita," but not the way most people
thought. He had studied the law regarding orphans, consulted tables on
sexual maturation, read "The Subnormal Adolescent Girl," taken notes on
acne and Tampax, borrowed faithfully from the tabloids. He acknowledged
that Lewis Carroll had long been on his mind."

While we're on the topic of Lewis Carroll... why have VN's literary
scholars been so loath to address Nabokov's very serious interest in
this most influential of British writers? This ostrich-like behaviour is
not only embarrassing, it does Nabokov absolutely no favours at all.

Jo Morgan
Sydney

----- End forwarded message -----
EDNOTE. I seriously doubt whether VN had interest in or expectation of
changing laws. Also, there is quite a bit of literature on VN and Lewis
Carroll.