Bruce Stone’s coruscating defense of Lolita contains many fine apercus on the novel and Nabokov: his essay will indeed be a great resource for students. He rightly argues that if
Lolita needed defense, it can defend itself through its art. In a much more subdued response in the latest
Nabokovian to the Cossack attacks on Lolita and its author’s legacy I add another line of defense: not the novel’s art but its social science, the plain prose of real history backing up the novel’s poetry and fiction:
“Women from around the world who work with those sexually abused as children, as well as women who themselves have been sexually abused, have contacted me over the years to express their admiration for
Lolita. They recognize Nabokov’s pioneering and penetrating insights into child sex abuse, and his perception of the damage done to victims and the resilience nevertheless possible for
some of them.
“A couple of weeks ago, for instance, Professor Lúcia Williams of the University of
São Carlos in Brazil, who directs a Laboratory of Violence Analysis and Prevention focused especially on child and family violence, wrote me that she was ‘taken by complete surprise
by how factual [Lolita] still is in terms of what we now know from child sexual abuse research. Since then I have acquired a small library on Nabokov, and I have been reading to understand the man who anticipated all that – there was hardly anything
published on the subject in the late 40s or early 50s.’
“I have supervised a PhD student whose life, and love of life, had been shattered by her father’s years-long abuse of her, but who wanted to work on Nabokov because he understood abuse and incest
so well. After I gave a talk on Lolita in Sydney a woman in the audience, Barbara Biggs, inscribed for me two of her books recounting her own amazing story. Sold off by her mother to a lawyer at fourteen, Biggs was even more able than Lolita herself
to rebound: she became a writer, a successful businesswoman, even a successful plaintiff against the man who almost destroyed her, and a champion of sexual abuse victims.”
I wish the Cossacks could hear this: this at least might be evidence they could understand.
Brian Boyd