Dear Nabokv-Lers,

Though I usually read Nabokv-L only in digest, a habit that has saved my fingers from many a premature trip to the “Send” button, a friend has forwarded an e-mail that seems addressed to me but was for some reason spread upon the list. While I am not entirely certain that Carolyn’s post requires my response, since the post is now publicly addressed to me, simple politeness requires that I respond. I’ll do so by enclosing the full text of my original answer to the Chronicle’s question before both the question and the answer ran into the editor’s frugal scissors. The full version of the response may or may not speak to the wisdom of finding in novels people we have put there, but it should make clear that the habit of thinking that one has found one’s acquaintances in Lolita is at least a half-century old. Lolita’s early reviewers seem not only to have known a real Lolita but, even more incredibly, to have known the same girl.

Question 5)- I’d be surprised if many teachers of Lolita have a good sense of the psychological realities of a person like Humbert Humbert, would they? And, in any case, is he convincing as a psychological, versus merely literary, creature?

ZK: Comparisons of the teachers’ and students’ sense of Humbert make for some of the more interesting discussions. His status as a tragi-comic “creep” parading his crime is always a good way to start a discussion of Lolita. But the book is not titled Humbert Humbert, and those discussions are not nearly as interesting as the efforts to outline the students’ images of Lolita. The simple fact is that many students shoulder-shruggingly consign the Humberts around them to the clinic and the television reality shows about serial child abusers. On the other hand, students find it remarkably easy to fall into the trap of imagining that they “really” know Lolita from their own lives, not just from Nabokov’s book. After one of my male students referred to Lolita as “prey,” I started asking my classes to read the early reviews of Lolita where five male reviewers, all professors, eerily and suspiciously echoed each other in describing Lolita as “singularly …depraved, ” "thoroughly corrupted already", “already corrupted,” "completely corrupt", and "utterly depraved.” Not even Humbert was so dismissive or unsympathetic. Some of my female students now find that the study of the traps into which Lolita’s early readers fell is almost as rewarding as reading Nabokov’s novel.

Zoran Kuzmanovich, Professor of English

Editor, Nabokov Studies

POB 6977

Department of English

209 Ridge Road

Davidson College

Davidson, NC 28035

704 894 2237 (office)

704 892 9575 (home)

704 894 2823 (fax)

----- Forwarded message from chaiselongue@earthlink.net -----

Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:32:03 -0800

From: Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@earthlink.net>

Reply-To: Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@earthlink.net>

Subject: Re: MLA Lolita interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education

To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum

On the other hand, students find it easy to fall into the trap of imagining

> that they "really" know Lolita from their own lives, not just from Nabokov's

> book. (Zoran Kuzmanovich)

Dear Zoran,

Funnny, I was just thinking the other day that I do know a real-life Lolita.

Her step-father abducted her after her mother's suicide and he actually managed to marry her morganatically (is that the word?) in Texas. She was even younger than Lolita, eleven, when this happened. She was with him for two years before she managed to escape.

I always adored her. She was fourteen when I first met her. A close friend of mine was trying to adopt her and though that was unsuccessful she did foster Tammy through middle and high schools.

Her story has a happier ending than Lolita's. Tammy is now more or less happily married with two sons. She is a wonderful mother and I am terribly proud to have had some small part in her upbringing.

I am amazed that Nabokov could have "known" Tammy years before I did.

Carolyn

----- End forwarded message -----