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It is a remarkable story on many levels. It's also very disturbing, as it manages to make you feel sympathy for an odious character. I did end up wondering how Nabokov could so completely imagine this world and this character, which was also troubling.

I don't think anyone is ready to read this as a child, not because it is going to corrupt children (who are routinely exposed to exactly this sort of manipulation in their teen years), but because there are so many levels you'd miss.

Truly a masterpiece, in spite of the icky subject matter, some parts are really dark in retrospect, but it's handled with such a light touch it's hard to look away.

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> I did end up wondering how Nabokov could so completely imagine this world and this character, which was also troubling.

As a writer, I have an extremely vivid imagination. Same with my friends who are writers. We all joke that our Google searches have us on every FBI watchlist that exist and a few that don’t.

The same goes with many artists. Embracing creativity involves some degree of getting rid of self-censorship.

I can imagine entire worlds of horrible things. In my head, I can examine human nature unbound by cultural norms, design whole societies based on different rules.

There is an unfortunate belief that a person’s writing is representative of their personal beliefs and moral codes. Such things influence someone’s writing, of course, but you’re examine things from the wrong direction if you try to apply the writing back to the author.

Have you read this book?

Every reader has their own interpretation of a text and the author's intent. Personally, looking back on Lolita I can say I'm a little uncomfortable with the level of empathy and identification the writer shows with Humbert Humbert, but I know the intention is to discomfit the reader by making them identify with a horrible character, so...

> I know the intention is to discomfit the reader by making them identify with a horrible character, so...

That's not the intent of the author. Nabokov has absolutely no moral or social points to make.

I didn't realize this until I read Eugene Onegin, which I take as the genesis of Nabokov's general perspective. Onegin is funny and ironic while still being emotionally affecting. Nabokov is much more in the "art for art's sake" camp than most people today are comfortable with.

Can you recommend a good english translation? I've always wanted to read that poem.

But, you're citing a book by Pushkin (or the anti-hero within?) as illustrative of Nabokov's worldview? While he affected amused disdain I think Nabokov did care about the world. Doesn't Onegin too?

I think it's hard to square writing a book about a manipulative child abuser with being utterly disinterested in moral or social issues, because the book probes deeply into both (even if it is a little fantastical and hyper-real). I agree Nabokov has a very dry, aristocratic and distant style, but he wouldn't write about such things if he didn't want to provoke debate. Art has meaning and his has a lot more depth than surface. His position is of course very ambiguous but there is a lot of empathy for Humbert in Lolita, which is partly why it is so entrancing and discomfiting.

Looks like James Falen manages to preserve the feel of orgiginal rythm. Also Kozlov(1998) is close. You can check others by yourself there:

English Versions of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/pml1/onegin/

It's hard to tell which one is the best, because I do not like the original ... too boring.

I've tried it again today and it's boring again but today I have found that a few primitive tricks were used many times when rythm doesn't work.

I think the common view about beauty of the poem is greatly exaggerated.

Thanks. Just found Nabokov's too, which looks interesting but ungainly (atypical for him).

I read James Falen's translation, which I thought was great. I don't speak Russian though so who knows.

> But, you're citing a book by Pushkin (or the anti-hero within?) as illustrative of Nabokov's worldview? While he affected amused disdain I think Nabokov did care about the world. Doesn't Onegin too?

That's my view, yeah. The figure here is the disaffected noble (or intellectual) who disdains society, creates his own values, and eventually tragically fails partly because he can't totally leave society behind. I think Nabokov loves those characters. I don't think he's criticizing them.

I am of course not saying you have to agree with Nabokov.

Yes I agree he probably would have loved a character like that, though I think part of the attraction is the recognition of their inevitable tragic end (with the implicit recognition that they are mistaken about the world).

Humbert of course is not in that mould (or not entirely), and I'm not saying Nabokov would be so crass as to write himself into Humbert, but he shows a lot of sly sympathy for him in Lolita, and his other books also show a preoccupation with transgressive sexuality in children (Ada), it's a weird obsession.

Many people make the mistake of thinking empathy and understanding are equivalent to sympathy and support.

Art (big A) is designed to make you feel and think. It is an experience.

Art communicates and empathy and sympathy are related.

What a particular work communicates is hard to pin down, and of course open to interpretation which changes over time (for example views of Alice in Wonderland have shifted due to revelations about the character of the author and his relation with his Alice), but it's certainly not possible to discuss whether a book sympathises with the central character if you don't engage with what the book says and instead talk in generalities.

My father reads voraciously. Whenever we talked about a book I was assigned in high school, he would say, "Literature is wasted on the young."

Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.

Literature, history, and math are all wasted on the young. We get exposed to a lot of things that we don't understand and can't appreciate, in the hopes that it will click for us later.

I honestly don't know if that really works, or if it's just cargo cult. I do know that I considered my English classes, and now I run a Shakespeare theater troupe. Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I can't tell if I'm here because, despite, or totally disconnected from my education.

> Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time.

I think there's something to this idea. I remember we first read the apology in translation sometime in early highschool. everyone thought it was boring af and no one cared. totally different when we read it later in my ancient greek class. the teacher really knew how to play to her audience, and at every bit of (mostly untranslatable) wordplay she would stop to point out how socrates was roasting his interlocutors. to be fair, it's a certain kind of student that self-selects into highschool ancient greek, but the class definitely got a lot more out of it that time around. you might not like to teach the apology as "the story of socrates the chad", but you gotta meet your audience where they are.

Sometimes though one falls in love with these things young and it's a life long maturing and appreciation. When I re-read things I always find new things, or new perspectives. The nuances I understood at 25 didn't diminish the impact of a book on me at 15, the way reading it at 35 didn't make it seem like it was wasted on 25 year old me.

The median age of working adults is probably around 40 or so, including those who's job it is to evaluate literature for use in schools. So it makes sense that you'd appreciate their choices more when you turn 40 or so.

This is an interesting situation, because it creates a reading list that is a "projected aspiration". We hope, I guess, that kids will read precociously. Education is, after all, the teaching of civilization's most important messages compressed into a fixed, very short time-span. School gets kids "caught up" on the civilizational conversations about things. But so much of the art and literature of humanity is like Lolita, in that it requires lots of actual living to appreciate (unlike algebra), so its position is...odd.

I wonder if, by being exposed to these things at a young age, we give kids a "shared coordinate system" to interpret and express their world, and so shape their choices in it.

I wonder sometimes if high-school English classes should use mid-level literary works for training, and leave the best ones to be appreciated later.

I think it's good to be exposed to them and at least aware of them as you grow up.

Certain things like Shakespeare I'd contend will appeal at least on a surface level to children too. Something like Lolita not so much.

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