Free Republic

If millennials are currently aged between the ages of 22 and 36, I am one, albeit somewhere in the upper echelons – and I am also a publisher. And so I note with particular interest when people who are usually not millennials and don’t work in publishing share their view that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita would never be published now because of awful young people like me. Not in a million years, they say. Highly unlikely, at a push. It’s a view that pops up with surprising frequency. In the Spectator this week, Rachel Johnson writes that Lolita would be stuck...

One of Lolita’s first supporters, the great critic Lionel Trilling, addressed what is perhaps a central issue at the heart of this controversial novel, when he warned of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with such an eloquent narrator: “We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents… We have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.”

Vandals spray-painted the word “pedophile” on the wall of a museum dedicated to famous writer Vladimir Nabokov in St. Petersburg, Fontanka.ru city news website reported on Tuesday. The wall was spray-painted by the same group of self-styled “St. Petersburg Cossacks” who broke the museum’s window on January 9 and have been sending ominous letters to the museum, accusing the writer of propagating pedophilia and threatening “God’s wrath,” Fontanka.ru said. The Nabokov Museum is located in the mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya street where the celebrated writer and poet was born in 1899 and lived until November 1917. Nabokov is best known...

Nabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches? Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died. It's a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father's unequivocal request and the...