Why do we care about the author? To ask this is to ask why we read at all: literature is the closest we can come to intellectual communion, a perfect crystallized thought preserved across time, proving, each time, that all desires are old and all loneliness is shared and nothing that torments us is entirely new. But what any writer thinks is wrought from what they have lived, which is why it has been of such great importance to readers to know whether Shakespeare was really the man from Stratford upon-Avon, if Emily Dickinson loved Susan Gilbert, if Gatsby was more Zelda than Scott. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert was said to have declared.
In a way, all authors are their characters. And in an age in which fluent and superficially moving prose can be generated without any human involvement, we want to know, more than ever, that there is a there there behind the words on the page.
Nabokov especially is an author that sparks obsession. He is not so much a man as he is a cosmos: a whole glittering, spinning cast of fascinating contemporaries, hangers-on, academics, epigones and the like, something almost straight out of a Nabokov novel. There is his father V.D. Nabokov, liberal jurist and statesman, shot dead in Berlin in 1922 after leaping from the stage to tackle the far-right monarchist assassins who had burst into an émigré political meeting; his mother Elena, of the fabulously wealthy mine-owning Rukavishnikov family, whose mercantile pedigree was the subject of snide attacks in upper-crust Russian society papers (on one occasion almost provoking Nabokov père to a duel); his wife Véra Slonim, gun-toting muse, secretary, agent, translator extraordinaire, the dedicatee of nearly every book he wrote; and his only child, Dmitri, opera singer, racing-car enthusiast, and Nabokov’s executor, who caused a literary scandal in 2009 by publishing his father’s last unfinished manuscript. And so on goes the list of fascinating characters.
Orbiting the Nabokov family are the “biographer-morticians,” as James Wood called them, the scholars who embalm the author’s life and corpus for eternity. The first was Andrew Field, an American academic who spent years gaining the Nabokovs’ trust and friendship before a spectacular falling out in the mid-1970s. Nabokov was livid at Field taking liberties with his beloved Russian language (“All the farcical Germanic ‘Akhhs…!!!’ must go”), and at Field’s attempts to exhume, or fabricate family scandals—among them the claim that Nabokov’s father was an illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander II, or that young Vladimir had called his mother Lolita. In a 1973 letter, Field warned that he could easily wait until the author died and then publish whatever he liked, perhaps even a book entitled “He Called His Mum Lolita.”
Needless to say, relations had soured. In a copy of Field’s third and final book on the author, published in 1986, Véra’s furious annotations can be seen in the margins, a running battalions of scribbled “no!!’s,” question marks, and exclamation points. Chastened by the Field debacle, Véra cast about for a worthier custodian; in 1979, having read the doctoral thesis of a young New Zealand lecturer in English named Brian Boyd, she invited him first to Montreux and then to catalogue her husband’s archive, a task he completed across two winters. The result was a two-volume biography, titled The Russian Years and The American Years respectively, which are still regarded as the definitive version in Nabokov scholarship, free of wild speculations. Yet on the subject of family history, there is one figure who haunts both accounts, who some readers have pressed as the key to reading Lolita itself. This was Nabokov’s uncle, Ruka.
Ruka was Nabokov’s maternal uncle, Elena’s brother. His full name was Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov, but his cosmopolitan French and Italian friends, being unable to pronounce his long Russian surname, “boiled it down to Ruka (with the accent on the last syllable),” which suited him “much better than his Christian name, Basil.”
Every account of Ruka professes that he lived a “Proustian life”; as his nephew would later write, he possessed “a colorful neurosis that should have gone with genius but in his case was not.” He was ostensibly a diplomat by trade (an attaché of some sort; it was never quite clear what he did) to the Russian embassy in Rome, where he by all accounts lived lavishly, renting Villa Torlonia, the mansion Mussolini would later inhabit. But Ruka’s nebulous title was more of a decorative backdrop for a life of professional dilettantism. He foxhunted in England and Italy; could crack ciphers in five languages; survived an airplane crash near Bayonne; and composed French songs. He was homosexual. He had a stutter. He suffered from a heart condition, angina pectoris. He played poker expertly and drifted, through the grand resorts and capitals of the Belle Époque: Paris, New York, Egypt to the pyramids, Pau in the autumn.
But summers he spent in Russia, the great season of migration of the nobility to the countryside. He owned an estate fifty kilometers south of St. Petersburg—Rozhdestveno, it was called, “a white-pillared mansion on a green, escarped hill,” was built in the Palladian style so beloved in the reign of Catherine the Great: six Ionic columns bearing the facade, with the roof crowned by a rectangular belvedere. From this eminence it presided over two thousand acres of birch and pine and black peat, with a view to the red karst caves ringing the sandstone gullies, while lily-choked streams wound past thickets of flowering bird-cherry, down to the red bank of the Oredezh. Across that river lay Vyra, the Nabokovs’ humbler estate.
It was at Vyra that Ruka appeared in Nabokov’s childhood, his carriage seen almost daily crossing the bridge over the Oredezh and speeding toward the house, bringing gifts of toys and picture books, and possibly, more inappropriate attentions. In his 1951 autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov recounts: “When I was eight or nine, he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments, and I felt embarrassed for my uncle by the presence of the servants and relieved when my father called him from the veranda: ‘Basile, on vous attend.'”
What are we to make of these words, “fondle” and “embarrassed”? Was Ruka simply an overly touchy relative, the irksome sort found in every family, or was it something more sinister? There exists a photograph. In it, a skinny blond boy — the young Nabokov smiling faintly, perches half-on, half-off the knee of a short, mustachioed man. His mother stands akimbo to the right. Ruka’s left hand grips Vladimir’s wrist and presses it to his own torso; the right is clasped firmly around the boy’s chest. Andrew Field claims stoutly that Ruka had been “in love” with little Vladimir and that his proclivity for unwanted touching was well known, in fact, that the peasants on his own estate had nicknamed him”bottom-feeler.”
Ruka died alone in Paris in 1916, felled at last by the heart condition the family had long dismissed as malade imaginaire. Shortly before his death, he informed the fifteen-year-old Vladimir, in “brusque, precise and somewhat old-fashioned French,” that he was making him his heir, then dismissed him with a curt “Je n’ai plus rien à vous dire.” The inheritance amounted to around two million dollars and the Rozhdestveno estate besides. “Payment for services,” Field claims. Boyd denies this, noting that Rozhdestveno had always been set aside for Vladimir as a common matter of established inheritance.
But it is undeniable that Ruka’s shadow stretches across Nabokov’s oeuvre. His habit of fainting, his love of cryptography and puzzles, his restless European dilettantism; all can be found in The Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Nabokov’s first English novel, whose eponymous protagonist shares all of these traits with Ruka. One scene finds Knight sprawled spread-eagled on his study floor (recall his heart condition), which almost exactly evokes a memory in Nabokov’s autobiography where his father stands looking “with quizzical resignation at my mother, then with disapproval at his brother-in-law spread-eagled in the footman’s path.”
More noteworthy, perhaps, is a bizarre, almost fetishistic motif that recurs across Nabokov’s fiction a surprising number of times. From his first published novel The Luzhin Defense (1930) through Bend Sinister (1947) to Lolita, the same scene appears—a male character maneuvers an unknowing female onto his lap and uses her for sexual gratification without her knowledge. Ever the fastidious aesthete, Nabokov never deigns to use such dirty words like “masturbate” or “orgasm,” rather, it’s “a sudden spasm distorted his face” in The Luzhin Defense, or “surreptitiously enjoying Mariette” in Bend Sinister, and, most infamously, in Lolita, Humbert brings himself to climax against Lo’s unknowing body — “her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifting in his tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap.” One cannot help but recall the photograph of the young Vladimir upon Ruka’s knee. Boyd suggests only that “perhaps Humbert’s first feignedly nonchalant fumbles with Lolita, a painter’s penchant for little Ada’s bottom, the adult Nabokov’s disapproval of homosexuals and his solicitude for childhood innocence may all have their origins here.” Perhaps.
All of which brings us to the inevitable question: what does this mean for how we read Lolita today? In the modern era, we are —rightly— more sensitive and alert to child sexual abuse than ever before. Though the novel has never seen an uncontroversial day since it was published, back in 1958 however, “it was widely viewed as a tragedy of a man tormented by lust; today, it’s read through the lens of pedophilia.” In the popular mythos, Lolita is now a subculture of fashion, a genre of pornography, and the name of an infamous private jet that ferried young girls to a billionaire financier’s private island.
The lollipop-sucking nymphet peering over her heart-shaped glasses on the poster of the 1962 film has become considerably more famous than the novel itself, and has confirmed for people who have not read it that Lolita is essentially high-brow erotica for the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world. “Indeed, when the Epstein files were released earlier this year, Lolita featured prominently amongst them; he displayed a first edition of the novel in his office; another photograph shows a well-worn copy lying on a bed, in the foreground an anonymous woman’s foot, lines from the novel’s opening paragraph, ‘She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock,’ written in black ink across the arch. In the immediate aftermath, an article in The New Statesman argued that Lolita had “rationalised Epstein’s sexual abuse,” that it “provided an aesthetic framework and meaning for what he was doing, but also a disguise.”
In this anxious cultural moment, I imagine a common reflex for many readers learning about the story of Nabokov’s uncle is to cast the author into the role of victim. This is a familiar, almost relieving template—the author as survivor, working through some sort of deep childhood psychological trauma through their art. You only have to perform a quick Google search for “Nabokov” and “Ruka” to see a plethora of these interpretations on the internet.
However, one of the many problems with this reading is that Nabokov himself would have loathed it. He spent much of his life heaping scorn on Freudian psychoanalysis, which he regarded as a flattening of the mystery of human consciousness into crude sexual origin stories. In a 1964 interview with Playboy magazine, when the interviewer bluntly suggests that the recurrence of pedophilic motifs in Nabokov’s works could be psychosexual reflections of Nabokov’s own childhood flirtations with the “Maria” and “Colette” in his autobiography, he responds icily: “The ordeal itself is much too silly and disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke.” Much of Lolita is also spent aping the “Viennese quack” and his followers—Humbert gleefully collects diagnoses of doctors who examine him (“totally impotent,” “potentially homosexual”)—as if mocking readers who might try to find the same in the author.
Of course, this does not mean that Nabokov gets absolute dominion over his own work—though he was famously demanding that it be subjected to his will. “I am the perfect dictator in that private world,” he declared in a 1967 interview. Indeed, many critics of his generation seem to be in a sort of hero-worshipping thrall toward him, in perpetual genuflect to that carefully cultivated image of “olympian remoteness”; glancing nervously over their shoulders, as if Professor might appear behind their desk and slash a fat F in red fountain pen across their footnotes. Even as I write this, I feel the gravitational pull to slip into what Mary Gaitskill calls “the alliterative, slightly frothy, preening prose” of “His Eminence.” Nabokov’s fiction is full of puzzles, allusions, unreliable narrators, and clever knots the reader must patiently untangle; we are trained to remain vigilant, always one step ahead of the text. Yet when it comes to his own self-mythologizing, he seems to demand that we swallow the performance whole. “The poets lie too much,” says Zarathustra. But Zarathustra is a poet also.
So what is the cost of reading Lolita as a victim story? This kind of interpretation misunderstands the unique staying power of the novel. The power in the novel is not its plot—which, read through the lens of psychoanalysis becomes a sort of straightforward morality play: Humbert a shadow figure of Ruka, Dolores a shadow of young Vladimir; a child is abused, the monster goes to jail, order is more or less restored in the world. Rather, the power of the novel lies in its prose, what Nabokov called his “love letter to the English language”; it is not merely Humbert seducing Lolita, but Humbert seducing you, the reader, the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, through the beautiful writing. To read it as the stylized memoir of a victim is to strip it of this very important meta-layer and the novel becomes morally safe; and worse than safe, it becomes boring.
Writing in Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille argues that the value of literature lies in its relationship to transgression and the forbidden. Bataille, as Nick Land writes, “names writing discourse insofar as it conforms to the order of utility. When it betrays, corrodes, and liquidates utility, he names it literature.” In other words, the moment you convert a transgressive work into a moral framework, you have made literature useful; and useful literature is no longer literature. Nabokov himself similarly detested what he called “literature of ideas,” the roman à thèse, dismissing such novels as “topical trash.” For him, the only true value in a work of fiction was what he called “aesthetic bliss,” to get a glimpse of the strange and transcendent states of being he called the “otherworld.”
We have become, increasingly, a culture that relates to literature through the lens of identity and experience. The questions we now ask of a novel are no longer “what does this do to me?” but “who has the right to say this?” and “what does this reveal about the person who said it?” In the process, we have subordinated the aesthetic function of literature to its sociological one. We read novels primarily as documents of experience rather than as aesthetic objects, and we evaluate them according to the authenticity of the experience they document. This is not entirely wrong. Contrary to Nabokov’s scorn, many people do find real value in the literature of ideas. But we are increasingly made uncomfortable by uncomfortable art.
In that infamous scene, after using Dolores for his pleasure on his lap, Humbert congratulates himself, for “Lolita had been safely solipsized.” The reader who approaches Lolita through the lens of victimhood solipsizes the novel just as Humbert solipsizes Lolita, they turn an unsettling work of art into one safe for consumption. As Alfred Appel Jr. notes in his introduction to the annotated Lolita, Nabokov’s characters “continually confront mirrors where they had hoped to find windows,” and “the transcendence of solipsism remains one of his major themes.” To read Lolita as a survivor’s narrative of a man processing his childhood sexual abuse through fiction is to miss the point of the novel entirely. This reader has not read Lolita at all, they have read a case study, and a rather inferior one at that, since there are better case studies—actual survivor testimonies—readily available. As an old cliché goes, art is meant to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed; the reader who reads Lolita as a survivor’s tale comes away with nothing but a reflection of their own preoccupations.
Catherine Tan is a senior at Colby College, where she studies Global Studies and Anthropology.