Re: How Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita, "My Most Difficult Book": A 1989 Documentary

On Tue, 21 Jul 2020 16:44:26 -0300, "Open Culture"
<[email protected]> wrote:

How many of us could write a book with the impact of Lolita? The task,
as revealed in the BBC Omnibus documentary above, lay almost beyond
even the formidable literary powers of Vladimir Nabokov - almost, but
obviously not quite. It did push him into new aesthetic, cultural, and
compositional realms, as evidenced by his memories of drafting the
novel on index cards in roadside motels (and when faced with
especially noisy or drafty accommodations, in the backseat of the
parked car) while road-tripping though the United States. The
documentary's subject is the exiled aristocrat novelist's experience
writing and publishing Lolita, the book that would make him
world-famous - as well as the experience that brought him to the time
and place that made such a cultural coup possible.

Aired in 1989, a dozen years after Nabokov's death, My Most Difficult
Book features interviews with the novelist's Ferrari-driving son and
translator Dmitri, his scholar-biographer Brian Boyd, and his
younger admirer-colleagues including Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, and
Edmund White. That last describes Nabokov's novels as "great systems
of meaning in which every element refers to every other one,"
and Lolita marked a new height in his achievement in that form.

But the book's popularity, or at least its initial wave of popularity,
may be better explained by the controversy surrounding the elements of
its by now well-known premise: the refined middle-aged European
narrator, the coarse twelve-year-old stepdaughter whom he contrives to
sexually possess - and succeeds in sexually possessing - as they drive
across America, a vast land whose look, feel, and language Nabokov
took pains to capture and repurpose.

"There are a lot of literalists out there," says Amis, "who will think
that you can't write a novel like Lolita without being a secret slaver
after young girls." That was as true in 1989 as it was in 1955, when
the book was first published, and indeed as true as it is today. Well
into middle age, we learn in the documentary, strangers would ask
Dmitri what it was like to be the son of a "dirty old man," and in
archive interview footage we see Nabokov address the public conflation
of himself and Humbert Humbert, Lolita's pedophiliac narrator. A
serious chess enthusiast, Nabokov describes himself as writing novels
as he would solve chess problems he posed to himself. What could
present a more rigorous challenge than to tell a story, at a high
artistic level, from the perspective of a monster? But Nabokov, as he
admitted to one interviewer, was indeed a monster, at least according
to one definition offered by his much-consulted English dictionary: "A
person of unnatural excellence."

Related Content:

Nabokov Reads Lolita, and Names the Greatest Books of the 20th Century

Hear Vladimir Nabokov Read From the Penultimate Chapter of Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita: Just Another Great Love Story?

The Notecards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita: A Look Inside
the Author's Creative Process

Vladimir Nabokov's Script for Stanley Kubrick's Lolita: See Pages from
His Original Draft

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different Lolita Book Covers

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities,
language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless
City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video
series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall,
on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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