Dear Colleagues,
This is the letter I wrote today to the
Christian Science Monitor, in response to S. Mintz’s editorial.
Humble regards,
David Powelstock
From: David Powelstock
[mailto:pstock@brandeis.edu]
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005
10:28 PM
To: 'letters@thenewstribune.com'
Subject: Steve Mintz "The
Golden Age of Childhood?"
To the Editor,
I applaud Steven Mintz’s demystification of our
era’s romanticization of the 1950s, an era of appalling hypocrisy.
But am stunned, utterly stunned that a respected professor of history could
have so profoundly misrepresented—or misread—Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel, Lolita.
To suggest that this novel, a masterpiece of such subtle and powerful moral
impact was in any way complicit in the reprehensible commercializing
eroticization of children that it so persuasively indicts is obscene. It
borders on the farcical that Professor Mintz should adduce to his putatively
moral ends this novel, the first and perhaps the most eloquent critique of the
growing appropriation of defenseless childhood to the corrupt and selfish ends
of adults. I wonder if Prof. Mintz has even read Lolita. Nabokov’s masterpiece
is not symptomatic, but if anything diagnostic of the 1950s.
Sincerely,
David Powelstock
Asst. Prof. of Russian & East European Literatures
Chair, Program in Russian & East European Studies
781.736.3347 (Office)
617. 489.4192